


The Mordhaus Archives

by apollos



Category: Metalocalypse
Genre: F/M, Gen, M/M, One Shot Collection
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-20
Updated: 2016-03-04
Packaged: 2018-05-02 11:46:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 60
Words: 50,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5247134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apollos/pseuds/apollos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Collection of stories that cannot stand on their own, mostly from Tumblr. Requests are currently closed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Bonding With Zoo Animals

**Author's Note:**

> Tumblr Request: "dethklok goes to the zoo." Gen. If I got to write a Metalocalypse episode this might just be it.

“Guys, we should totally goes to the zoo.” 

“Toki, we are not going to the fucking zoo.”

It was their third huge American tour and they were relaxing in their bus’s hot tub, all five of them, previously in silence until Toki sat straight up in the water, spraying his bandmates and exclaiming that they should totally go the zoo. Nathan dismissed this outright and Skwisgaar gave a short nod in agreement. Toki, undeterred, crossed his arm and continued to make his case.

“Aparts from de fact dat de zoo is  _awesome_ ,” Toki said, drawing the last word out, “it can totally be brutal, too.”

“Go on,” Pickles said, entertaining the notion and raising a single eyebrow. He tipped his glass to Toki like Gatsby at a party.

“They has animals that can kill you in a zoo! Rhinestoneoctapuses—” 

"Oh, ja, rindaknoxvilles.” Skwisgaar again nodded, fingers moving up and down his half-submerged guitar and somehow producing no noise. “Totallies metals. Like unicorns that can kills you.”

“Hey, I was talking,” Toki whined, turning towards Skwisgaar and pouting. Skwisgaar shrugged.

“Yeah, okay, they have animals that can kill you,” Nathan said. “But will there be, you know, guaranteed rhinoceros murder? Good song title. Somebody write that down.” 

“We are de richest men in de world,” Toki said. He uncrossed his arms and relaxed, certain that he had won this argument or proposal, whatever it was. “I’m sure it can be ables to be arranged.”

Between the city they had just played in and the city they were going to next was a zoo. It was not a particularly amazing zoo, rather mediocre as far as zoos went, pushed off from the highway and sprawling over a decent amount of land. Toki bounced with excitement for the entire ride there, jabbering on about his zoo plans and ignoring everybody else’s requests to shut up. Their driver parked crookedly over several parking spaces in the parking lot, hitting a few cars in the process. Charles got off the bus with them, still very much their babysitter and needing to make sure they didn’t get lost or accidentally cause the apocalypse while looking at monkeys or manatees. They bypassed the queue and got into the zoo for free, recognized as Dethklok.

At Nathan’s insistence they went towards the aquatic life first, taking a bridge that went over a river populated by manatees. Pickles, tipsy and sipping from a bottle of hard liquor, laughed at them; Murderface almost pissed on one’s head until Charles cleared his throat and reminded him that that was not appropriate behavior. Inside the aquarium Nathan peered into every individual tank, holding long and deep conversations with the fishes, while Pickles watched the same five-minute video on taking care of the ecosystem over and over (“This is  _important_ ,” he insisted each time Charles or Murderface tried to drag him away), Skwisgaar and Toki got into an argument over the pronunciation of  _flamingo_ , and Murderface watched the manatees through the large window towards the south end of the aquarium that opened up to the river, initially taunting them but forming a connection after a while, probably with root in their general similarities. Charles hovered around them all, pinching the bridge of his nose with gusto and murmuring under his breath.

The exit of the aquarium took them into the bird section, which was pretty lame until a hawk broke free and pecked somebody’s eyes out, a marginally cool occurrence. They kept walking, beginning to sweat from the amount of people and sun beating down on them, until they hit some sort of Africa replication towards the back of the zoo. On grand display was a lion, a gorgeous and large beast with an impressive mane. Somebody stuck their arm in his cage and got it bitten off. Murderface broke into the lion’s cage and befriended it, hugging it around the neck and petting it, asking Charles to make arrangements for this lion to become Murderface’s pet. Charles pulled out his cell phone and got to doing that.

The rhinoceroses were not a disappointment. One gave birth while the four of them (Murderface and Charles preoccupied with the legal process of adopting a lion from the zoo) watched. Toki requested to name the newborn, christening it  _Stor_ , despite Skwisgaar claiming that  _dat ams de most unoriginal name I has ever heared_. 

They stopped off to watch the monkeys before riding the zoo’s rollercoaster and carousel. Nobody except Toki admitted to enjoying the carousel more, though in truth they all had. Charles and Murderface rejoined them afterwards, Murderface’s new pet lion on a plane back to Mordhaus and Charles looking worn out. It was getting late and they decided to watch the sunset from an observation tower towards the front of the zoo. Everybody except Toki was wheezing and panting by the time they reached the top of the tower, layering their arms on the railing and staring out at the sun descending on the zoo. Below them an escaped ape beat a soccer mom to death with part of the bars of his old cage.

“See, the zoo is fun,” Toki said. He looked around at his bandmates and Charles, smiling and make eye contact with each of them.

“I guess so,” Nathan grunted, jerking his head to get hair out of his eyes. He looked off to the side and moved his hand in a noncommittal manner.

“I liked it,” Pickles said. He threw down the third bottle he had made his way through that night, hitting the ape in the head. 

“It wasch great, Toki, I got a fucking lion,” Murderface said.

“Ja,” was Skwisgaar’s contribution.

“Well, uh, guys, I’m glad you all had a good time at the, uh, zoo,” Charles said. He fidgeted around behind them, sounding awkward and pained as he spoke. “But you have work to do, and we have to be getting back to the bus and the tour and the things that make you money.”

“Fuck off, Charlie, we’re enjoying the zoo.” It didn’t matter who said it (though the words came from Pickles’s mouth); they were all thinking it.


	2. In the Helicopter After the War

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr Request: Nathan and Pickles tender fluff. Nathan/Pickles.

Tours took a lot out of a man. Extended periods of time away from your own bed and the associated comforting feeling of home drained you of energy, requiring more artificial substances to give you bursts long enough for the duration of a show, until you were tired and falling asleep on your other band members’ shoulders and yawning all over the place, itching inside of yourself for  _return_  and  _recluse_. Nathan and Pickles found themselves in this situation on a helicopter ride from someplace in Russia back to Mordhaus, Pickles’s head on Nathan’s shoulder and Nathan’s head on Pickles’s, sitting by themselves and separated from the sleeping pile of Toki, Skwisgaar and Murderface, laying on top of each other in that order. Nathan and Pickles weren’t quite asleep but not quite awake, either, in that place where reality felt like a dream and sleep was crawling in but not quite there.

“Good show,” Nathan mumbled, rolling his mouth into Pickles’s dreads.

“Yeah,” Pickles said. 

“You know,” Nathan said, speaking into Pickles’s scalp, “your accent, like, goes away, when you’re this tired.”

“Really?” Pickles closed his eyes and pressed his forehead into Nathan’s shoulder, moving his head up and down a bit. An old signal, Nathan picked his legs up and let Pickles come into his lap, Nathan leaning his back against the armrest of the couch they occupied. Pickles fit in Nathan’s lap almost perfectly, his head against Nathan’s chest and knees curled into his own, Nathan’s arms wrapping around him.

“Yeah.” Nathan sounded closer to sleep than Pickles. “Guess ‘cause you speak slower. Or something.”

“Sweet of you to notice.” Pickles’s mouth widened into a sloppy grin. “Real sweet.” He patted Nathan’s chest a few times.

“Ugh,” Nathan said. There was no real emotion behind it. He rubbed Pickles’s back up and down. “Good show,” he said, again. “Good tour. I have some ideas for songs for the next album.” There were gaps between his syllables and he punctuated the sentence with a yawn, voice betraying his exhaustion. 

“’Course you do,” Pickles said. He didn’t mean anything behind it. “But we don’t have to work for a while. Let’s just…let’s just sleep. For a long time. A real long time.” He let his eyes flutter shut, replacing the image of his sleeping bandmates piled on top of each other with blackness. 

“I’d…sleep…yeah.” Nathan’s voice faltered and he pulled Pickles tighter towards him, almost to the point of pain. His grip lessened as his consciousness slipped. Pickles placed a hand over Nathan’s chest, felt his heartbeat beneath his shirt, finding it, along with the rise and fall of Nathan’s breathing chest, matched his own. They fell asleep in sync.


	3. Torturous Electricity Between Both of Us

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr Request: Skwisgaar finds Toki's scars for the first time. Skwisgaar/Toki. Written before Doomstar came out. Title from Daughter's "Landfill."

Auditions for their new rhythm guitarist yielded nothing. Skwisgaar sat with his bandmates on their couch, their dining room table dragged in front of it to write and rest their elbows on, bored and flinching at every sour or slow note he heard from the guitar of some greasy metal fan with unwashed hair and far too hopeful eyes. He drummed his fingers along the table, sat with his face in his hand, wished for immediate death and waved every candidate off.

“Dude,” Pickles said after their forty-second failed applicant, “we have to pick  _somebody_. The fuck is your problem, Skwisgaar? The last guy wasn’t too bad.”

The last guy had been a short and scrawny twenty-five-year old with stubby fingers. He had smelled like garlic, enough that Skwisgaar could detect it from ten feet away, and he’d broken a guitar string in the process of playing an original song. Skwisgaar groaned and sat up, leaning back into the couch. Maybe if he tried hard enough it would engulf him and he would die and this whole mess would be over with. “Dey all sucks,” Skwisgaar said. He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hands. “Dey ams all dildoes guitar players.”

“We at least need a temporary replacement,” Pickles said. He was sitting on Skwisgaar’s right and drinking from a beer bottle, tapping out a beat with his foot. Skwisgaar opened his eyes and sent Pickles’s bouncing knee a death glare.

“I doesn’t cares,” Skwisgaar said. He stood up, his thighs bumping into the table in front of them. He climbed over Murderface’s legs and went towards the direction of his room. “I ams done.”

Before he slammed his door he heard Nathan ask Pickles  _the fuck is his problem_? and the beginning of Murderface’s lisp forming a quip. Once inside his room, nothing more than a windowless and poorly lit box with a mattress shoved in a corner and a guitar in the other, he sat on the floor and pulled his guitar towards him. Magnus’s mental breakdown led to Skwisgaar attaining the lead guitarist position, something he had always thought he deserved, but mirth was lost on him for lack of a suitable rhythm. He needed somebody not quite as his skill level but decent enough to bring out the best in his playing, to support the band. He scowled and fingered his guitar, fast as he could, pouring all of his effort into it. It was all he wanted in life to be a lead guitarist for a famous band. He didn't need some half-assed rhythm bogging him down.

The walls of their apartment were soundproofed, a necessity to not get kicked out, and he couldn't hear what was going on outside. In about half an hour—a rough estimate, as there was no clock available to him—somebody knocked on his door once, waited a few seconds, then knocked in a steady stream. Skwisgaar placed his guitar down and opened the door, revealing an almost distraught-looking Murderface.

“You have  _got_ to schee thisch,” Murderface panted. He jammed a thumb behind him, towards the living room. Over Murderface’s head Skwisgaar saw a guy standing in there, holding a guitar and looking nervous.

“Why,” Skwisgaar said, voice flat.

Murderface didn’t respond but grabbed Skwisgaar’s wrist and dragged him into the living room. Skwisgaar broke free and sat himself on the couch before Murderface could toss him on it, propping his boots up on the table and putting his arms behind his head.

“Do that again,” Pickles said. He’d put his beer down and was leaning in towards the guy.

The guy began to play. It wasn’t spectacular. It wasn’t  _Skwisgaar_  or even Magnus. It was the guy’s own, his competent own, his fingers moving fast enough for the band’s pace and producing a good enough sound. It was the best of all the auditions they’d heard, the best they were probably going to find, but it wasn’t spectacular. Skwisgaar knew that no matter what he said at this point the guy was their new rhythm, his fellow guitarist, and so he listened. When the guy stopped, he looked at them, eyes wide and earnest, on the verge of shaking.

Skwisgaar shrugged. “Good enough,” he said. Pickles whooped and shot up to greet the guy, shaking his hand and asking his name.

“Toki Wartooth,” the guy said. Skwisgaar recognized the accent—Norwegian. Scandinavian. All the better.

“Well, Toki,” Pickles said. He slapped a hand on Toki’s shoulder. “Welcome to Dethklok.”

Toki eased into life with them. He took Magnus’s own room and spent most of his time not practicing in there. They thought he was a little quiet, a little too introverted, but he played good guitar so they didn’t give it too much thought. It nagged at Skwisgaar, though, Toki’s privacy and the polite way he would smile, his straight posture. Something was off. Skwisgaar didn’t know what and he didn’t ask, but something wasn’t right with Toki, something put him on edge. The feeling disappeared as time rolled by and they moved apartments a few times until renting out a shabby house in a shady part of town, playing shows every night, starting to get some income from the album they put out. Toki kept to himself through all of this, playing his guitar when called upon but otherwise disappearing.

Skwisgaar figured out what bothered him when he caught a naked Murderface walking from the shower to his room. Once he’d finished choking on his tongue, Skwisgaar realized that he had seen all of his bandmates in various stages of undress or compromising positions except for Toki. He’d never even seen the kid with his boots off. He was going to remedy this.

He went to Toki’s room and knocked on the door. Toki slipped out, pulling the door shut behind him. The lights in his room were off; Skwisgaar couldn’t make out anything anyway.

“De fucks ams yous problem?” Skwisgaar asked. He stepped back so he could make eye contact with Toki.

“What do you mean?” Short, polite sentences. Straight posture. Clean-shaven. Neatly combed and parted hair. Like a good little choir boy.

“Why ams you so—” Skwsigaar struggled to find the words. “ _Polite_ and  _modest_ ,” he managed, after a few seconds.

Toki shrugged. “I was raised that way,” he said.

“Well,” Skwisgaar said. “Stops.”

Toki shook his head in a few bursts, his hair swinging around his face. “I’m only being polite,” he said.

“We ams a fucking death metal band,” Skwisgaar said. He spelled it out for the guy. He didn’t think he was stupid; slow, maybe, but not stupid. “Polite amns’t means shit.”

Toki had this look in his eyes like he knew something Skwisgaar didn’t, which he probably did, but it still annoyed Skwisgaar. “I can’t just stop,” Toki said.

“You ams from Norway, ja?” Skwisgaar asked. Toki nodded; Skwisgaar continued to talk. “Well, I ams a Swede. I understands a little thing about de European culture. You acts weird, even fors a Norwegian.”

Toki bit his lip and said nothing. He opened the door to his room to slip inside but Skwisgaar acted fast, slamming his hand against the faux wood and opening the room wide. The light spilling from the hallway was enough for Skwisgaar to see a bed, a guitar and a desk with some pictures on it, though not enough to see what the pictures were. Skwisgaar stepped past Toki, taking advantage of Toki’s manners and his superior height, and flicked the light switch on. The pictures on Toki’s desk were of two older people swaddled in black robes, their hair hidden by headwear and their skin leathery and sunken, eyes morose. Skwisgaar furrowed his brow and looked at Toki. He could see a resemblance, something in the eyes and the way his jaw set, to the woman, and around the cheekbones and nose to the man. Toki’s parents, solemn against a background of Norwegian snow, in the pictures on Toki’s desk.

Toki continued to say nothing. Skwisgaar’s hand slid from the door. Something was up. He looked at Toki, compared his eyebrows, the shape of his chin, the ridges around his eyes, to the pictures on his desk. Definitely his parents, looking like cult members in an abandoned Norwegian village. They somehow produced the man–barely even a man, more of a teenager that had surpassed teens in quantitative age–standing in front of Skwisgaar with his long hair and affinity for death metal. He couldn’t connect the two.

“My parents,” Toki croaked after a pregnant pause. Skwisgaar figured it out when he heard Toki’s voice.

“Ams dey nice people?” Skwisgaar asked, voice soft. Toki’s head lurched, halfway between a  _yes_ and a  _no_ , and the pieces fell in place like snow to the ground. “Mean peoples,” Skwisgaar said. He touched Toki’s shoulder.

It felt right to kiss him and Skwisgaar always followed his sexual impulses so he kissed Toki, lifting his chin with a finger underneath. Tender. Skwisgaar had no further intentions. He didn’t know what the fuck was going on, really, what the band had taken in. Toki broke the kiss—Skwisgaar expected him to—and turned around, which was sort of weird. He tugged off his shirt, taking it off by the back of the neck, and Skwisgaar understood.

Crisscrossed on Toki’s tanned skin were scars of various shapes and sizes, pink and smooth to touch when Skwisgaar reached out to feel them. “Oh,” Skwisgaar said, just “oh,” just an affirmation of understanding. Toki’s parents. His manners. His scars. Skwisgaar didn’t want to know anything further, didn’t want this, but Toki was shaking and making these little noises and Skwisgaar wasn’t moving his fingers. Toki moved them away after a few seconds, put his shirt back on, and turned around.

“Oh,” Skwisgaar said again. “I understands now.”

Toki nodded. Not a polite nod, but an actual nod, slow and chin-to-chest. “Don’t tell the other guys,” he said.

“I wouldn’ts,” Skwisgaar said.

Toki stood there, trembling, and Skwisgaar stood there, unable to command his body into leaving. He didn’t know what was happening but he hugged Toki when he fell into him, put his chin on Toki’s head and rubbed his back, didn’t say anything as Toki shook. Toki didn’t cry, just quivered, holding an earthquake inside of his chest. He didn’t say anything, either, but Skwisgaar figured that this was some sort of release that Toki needed. Maybe after this was done he would warm up to the rest of the band, initiate himself, bear his back. For now Skwisgaar held Toki, held his secret, held his soul.


	4. The Best Lay You'll Ever Have

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr Request: Kinky sexy Skwistok. Skwisgaar/Toki. TW for bloodplay, light bondage and dubcon involving a presumed age gap.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Takes place in the same universe as "Torturous Electricity Between Both of Us" in my mind but can be read separately. Also, rereading this, I'm pretty fond of it.

Blood drips into his mouth, copper pennies on his tongue. He drags his nails down Skwisgaar’s back, too short to slice skin but enough to hurt, and rolls him on his back. The blood from the scratches on his chest spills towards the side now and Toki rolls his tongue back, swallowing what was in mouth, dips his head down to suck from the wound. Skwisgaar makes an indistinguishable noise and grinds his hips up; Toki grins a vampire grin. He crawls up and licks his way into Skwisgaar’s mouth, knots their tongue together, sticks his hand into the fray where their crotches meet and kneads Skwisgaar’s cock through his pants.

* * *

“Here we goes,” Toki mutters, tying the rope around Skwisgaar’s wrists. Skwisgaar makes a reluctant noise in his throat, somewhere between a grunt and a curse, kicks his head back like a stubborn horse. Toki steps from behind him and grabs him by the chin, straightens his head. “Be good,” he whispers, breath hot on Skwisgaar’s face. Skwisgaar sneers at him. He’s only pretending not to like this; the bulge in his jeans indicate otherwise. Toki bends and shackles Skwisgaar’s feet to the ground, pockets the key. They’re in some recently discovered dungeon of Mordhaus’s, maybe a bastion for Murderface’s disregarded torture devices. Toki had stumbled upon it earlier that day.

Toki stands up and stares at Skwisgaar, head cocked. He walks around Skwisgaar and studies him from every angle, a sculptor surveying his recent invention. He leans in close so that their noses are touching and brings their lips together, experimental, then tilts and kisses him deeply. Skwisgaar’s tongue works quick and strong as his fingers on the guitar and Toki draws back. Skwisgaar leans forward to rejoin their mouths and Toki stops him with a hand to his chest. He’s stronger than Skwisgaar, a fact he’s only begun to appreciate recently. Skwisgaar stills beneath his hand and Toki drags it down, not caring to be gentle. He unbuttons Skwisgaar’s jeans with the one hand as he holds his head with the other, making eye contact. Skwisgaar’s trying to look spiteful but his eyes, hazy with lust and what’s probably Skwisgaar’s equivalent of love, is preventing it.

Toki lowers to his knees to take Skwisgaar’s dick in his mouth and uses his hands to prevent Skwisgaar from thrusting, knocking him back whenever he tries. Toki can take him all the way in, no gag reflex to be found in his throat, but he doesn’t, only a few inches, only a few bobs, and then he’s off and only licking around the tip, still preventing Skwisgaar from moving his hips forward.

“Goddamnits,” Skwisgaar says. He’s breathing through his nose, hard, panting. Toki looks up and smiles at him, still on his knees, hands still on Skwisgaar’s pelvis, not doing anything with the dick in front of his face. Skwisgaar’s muscles are twitching with feverence, desperate. “ _Goddamnits_ , Toki.”

Toki shrugs and stands up again, pulls Skwisgaar in for a kiss, one hand entangled in Skwisgaar’s hair. Toki breaks the kiss to run his mouth down Skwisgaar’s jaw, down his neck, his shoulder, his chest, his stomach, down and down, everywhere but his cock, ignoring it. He doesn’t prevent Skwisgaar from thrusting; he lets him fuck the air. Toki’s enjoying this, really relishing it, the feral look in Skwisgaar’s eyes, the grunts he makes, the hardness of his teeth clenched together. Toki moves over Skwisgaar’s body with his mouth and his fingers but only lightly, only tracing, drawing, little touches.

It’s fifteen minutes of this before Skwisgaar knocks his head towards the side and opens his mouth, shouts. “ _Please_ ,” he says, face contorted, voice broken. Toki stops nibbling at a spot on his side, towards the place where his hips flare out, and straightens up.

“That’s what I wanted,” Toki says. He leans into Skwisgaar, their foreheads pressing into each other, and unties the knot keeping his hands tied. Skwisgaar’s hands burst forward, grabbing Toki’s face and mashing their lips together. It’s no fun to give and not receive; Toki takes the key to Skwisgaar’s shackles from his pocket and undoes them, lets Skwisgaar fuck him up against the wall beside a guillotine, lets Skwisgaar bite his neck and go rough, comes from penetration alone.

* * *

Toki’s a virgin when he enters Dethklok. It’s not surprising—he’s twenty-two, fresh from Norway, the wounds on his back aren’t yet scarred and he’s been separated from his parents for only a week. He doesn’t know the details; some guy in a suit came to his door and took him away, told him he was important to an ancient prophecy and had to learn to play rhythm guitar for a death metal band. Toki went along with it, not really having a choice, and sort of glad to be away from his parents. That’s not the point, though. The point is that Toki is a virgin, never even kissed somebody, and he’s been thrown in into a world of sex.

What he knew of sex before Dethklok was minimal, controlled by his parents. It was for recreation or procreation between a man and a woman; he would experience it when he was married. The sex he’s being exposed to at the moment is nothing like that, a man and three women locked inside of a room, none of them married (at least to each other) and all of them shouting and screaming. Toki’s more than a little confused and more than a little turned on, back against the flimsy wall of his new apartment, listening to his bandmate fuck a bunch of groupie girls.

Because Toki still has childish curiosity and a lack of shame, he approaches Skwisgaar the next day, asks him about sex. Just like that—“What is sex, really?” and Skwisgaar is laughing in his face and wiping tears away, patting Toki on the shoulder.

Toki frowns, searches for the English to say what he needs to say in, and then continues to talk. “My parents told me that sex is for a man and a woman when they are married.”

Skwisgaar laughs again and shakes his head. His hand on Toki’s shoulder is starting to make Toki feel uncomfortable. “Oh, littles Toki,” Skwisgaar says. Toki doesn’t appreciate the nickname. “Does you need a demonstrations?” He pronounces the first part of the word like the English pronunciation for  _demon_ ; Toki finds it apt.

Toki considers it for a second, tapping his chin with his finger. “It couldn’t hurt,” he says. He isn’t serious, adding an air of sarcasm to his voice, but then Skwisgaar is kissing him and, oh, he’s going to get a demonstration anyway. A demonstration from a demon. They’re in the kitchen of their apartment, easy to be seen at any time, but this doesn’t seem to concern Skwisgaar as his mouth works against Toki’s own and his hands travel to his jeans. Skwisgaar rolls them down and Toki has a fleeting second of gratitude that Skwisgaar isn’t going to take off his shirt, he doesn’t want to explain the scars, and then what the  _fuck_ , Skwisgaar’s hand is on his dick, and then his other one is reaching behind him and…fingering, he thinks that’s the term,  _fingering_ him. Skwisgaar is narrating the entire thing, the amusement in his voice draining away and being replaced by something Toki can’t identify.

“Sex between two men amns’t the sames, obiously,” Skwisgaar says. “With a ladies, you would be de one penetrating.” His fingers spread Toki wide and he bends his body away from Toki, grabbing a bottle of olive oil that somebody must’ve left on the counter. Convenient. “I has no preference,” Skwisgaar says as he continues to work Toki with his fingers and hands him the bottle of olive oil. “I just likes to be de one fuckingks, not beingks fucked.” Toki opens the bottle of olive oil, head clouded, and pours some on Skwisgaar’s outstretched hand. “Good,” Skwisgaar said, and he takes the bottle from Toki and puts it back on the counter, all while he teases something in Toki’s ass that’s making his hips lurch forward without his approval. Skwisgaar oils his dick and then he’s quiet, his mouth on Toki’s, only for a few seconds before he takes his fingers away from Toki and turns him around. He slides into Toki with Toki’s face pressed into the refrigerator, resumes his narration. “This ams sex,” he says, and he lowers his forehead to press against Toki’s shoulder, gets to thrusting.

 “Oh,” Toki says. “Okay. I like it.” He’s not lying. He’s a little confused, maybe, but mostly this is the best thing he’s ever felt. “Okay,” he says again, and Skwisgaar snakes a hand around to jerk Toki’s cock as he thrusts, pumping into him and pumping him, and Toki says, “Okay,” again, and then he’s coming, and then Skwisgaar is, and then he pulls out and Toki turns around and they’re looking at each other.

“Does you want to makes dat a regular thing, ja?” Skwisgaar asks, eyebrows raised.

Toki nods. Skwisgaar laughs. Compared to the laughter from earlier, which was harsh and mean-spirited, this sort of beautiful, Toki thinks.

* * *

Their thighs brush under the table during breakfast at Mordhaus and they exchange a look. That happens sometimes, accidental touches sending bolts of electricity and turning them both on, even if they’d just stumbled from a shared night in a shared bed. The other guys still don’t know about it and they don’t pay attention enough to care. They’re chattering among themselves across the table, talking about some insipid and insane shit that Toki can’t force himself to care about. He’s even drinking coffee from a mug with Skwisgaar’s skeletal face—he would think that the other guys would  _notice_ . It’s an inside joke inside of an inside joke for him and Skwisgaar, and they smile with their interlocked gaze, laughing at the others’ stupidity.

Under the table Toki moves to cover Skwisgaar’s dick with his hand, just resting it there, willing it to rise. It does and Toki starts to knead it, going as far to slip his hands inside his pants, stroking. It’s obvious and the other guys still don’t notice it. Skwisgaar’s catching on, smirking at Toki.

Skwisgaar turns it into a game when he says, “Ja, we had dat in Sweden,” contributing to the conversation. Skwisgaar’s looking at Murderface while he says it and Toki’s running his hand up and down Skwisgaar’s shaft as he says it and Toki goes red, afraid of what will happen next.

“Nobody caresch about Schweden,” Murderface says, rolling his eyes at Skwisgaar and turning back towards the conversation. Toki balks, mouth hanging open, and squeezes Skwisgaar’s dick hard enough to hurt. Skwisgaar responds by taking the hand that had been holding his coffee mug and moving to Toki’s own erection, slipping inside of Toki’s own pants, Toki needs to stop underestimating Skwisgaar’s ability to be a total dick. Toki is an unabashedly vocal lover; he whimpers, can’t stop himself, and the other guys  _still_ don’t notice.

Skwisgaar comes in Toki’s hand when Toki whimpers and Toki bites his lip. His hand is covered in cum, he has no idea what he’s going to do, the other guys continue to talk to themselves. Toki has an idea, convinces himself that if they’re caught this will be all on Skwisgaar, and he takes his hand to his mouth and licks the cum off. Swallows it. Skwisgaar’s mouth parts, his throat bobs like he wants to groan, but he won’t let himself, better at self-control than Toki can ever help to be because his own hips are bucking, he’s cumming, he really can’t believe the other guys haven’t noticed yet.

Skwisgaar, not one to be beat by any means, drags his hand up from Toki’s crotch and towards Toki’s mouth. Toki, not one to deny a challenge, also licks his cum from Skwisgaar’s hand. He sucks on his fingers, turns his body towards him and makes eye contact. The other guys  _still_ don’t notice.

Skwisgaar leans in and kisses Toki. This grabs the attention of the group, Murderface, Nathan and Pickles screaming and jumping and making noise. Toki doesn’t care; he’s glad they  _finally_ fucking noticed. He kisses Skwisgaar deeper, pulls him closer by his shirt, knots his finger in his hair. He doesn’t care.

* * *

Toki hadn’t been the one to give Skwisgaar the scratches on his chest but he takes advantage of them. It’s some of the best sex they’ve had, over the years, and afterwards Toki lays his head on Skwisgaar’s arm and traces over the scratches, wondering if they’ll scar. He knows they won’t, but it’s weird to think about, Skwisgaar being scarred. Toki’s scarred, after all, and he thinks he bears enough for the two of them.

“Didn’t knows you liked blood,” Skwisgaar mumbles, yawning as punctuation.

Toki laughs. “I likes  _everything_ ,” he says.


	5. Nothing Better to Do

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr Request: Cute Nathan&Toki. Gen but can be read into if you want.

 “Nathan, will you helps me with dis model planes?”

Nathan looked up from the newspaper he had been reading— _FLORIDA MAN KILLS ZOO ANIMAL BY ACCIDENT—_ and at Toki. Toki stood in front of him, his bottom lip pushed out in a pout and hands around a colorful box depicting a model airplane.

“No,” Nathan said, flat. He tilted his head down and peered through his reading glasses at the page.

“Please!” Toki said. He walked forward, though not too far, and tore the newspaper out of Nathan’s hands. This got his attention, though it wasn’t very positive. “Pretty please with de sugars and de cherries on top!” Toki pleaded. Nathan expected him to get on the floor and beg. Toki had done that before. “It ams de plane dat killed de most people in all of de wars,” Toki said, nudging the box towards Nathan.

Fuck. That was brutal. Nathan sighed, a long, hard and laboring sigh. “Will it get you to shut up?” He asked through gritted teeth, unbelieving that he was actually considering this.

Toki bit his lip and nodded. He looked pitiful standing there.

Nathan sighed again and stood up. “Okay,” he said. Toki’s face erupted into a grin and he flounced off in the direction of his room. Nathan dragged his feet and followed him, making noises of discontent and exasperation, hoping Toki would call the whole thing off. It was a Saturday morning and most of Mordhaus was asleep, including their bandmates, passed out after Friday night’s show and subsequent party. He didn’t have anything better to do, but he still hoped that Toki would call the whole thing off so he could go…golf, or something. Yeah. He wasn’t coming up with  _shit_. So, Nathan found himself sitting on a small stool in Toki’s room, passing Toki impossibly tiny model airplane parts or superglue or whatever the fuck else he asked for all the while Toki babbled on, grinned, and constructed a model airplane. He had only gotten a fourth of the way through, maybe, when he stood up and declared them done, clapping his hands together and bouncing.

Nathan stood up, too, and was about to turn for the door when Toki lunged forward and wrapped his arms around Nathan. Nathan did not return the hug. “Oh, thanks you!” Toki said, squeezing Nathan tight.

“Whatever.”


	6. The Opposite of Drunk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr Request: Nathan/Pickles with wandering hands. Nathan/Pickles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Takes place after "In the Helicopter After the War" in my mind but can be read independently.

Mordhaus was quiet, as usual, and Pickles was in the kitchen leaning on the counter, stirring a pot of porridge. It was relaxing to act like a normal jack-off and make your own food sometimes and that was the logic behind it, standing there in his briefs with sleep crusted to his eyes and one of his dreadlocks sticking at a weird angle. They’d just gotten back from a tour and he presumed the rest of his band to be asleep in their beds. He hadn’t the slightest clue of what Charles was up to, didn’t really care, and hadn’t seen a Klokateer in a good half an hour. He took the spoon from his porridge and set it down on the counter, then his elbows, looking out the window. He felt a little glorious, basked in the bluish light of morning, the light freckles along his shoulders visible.

He heard something move behind him, then a familiar general kind of grumble, and then there were hands on his hips. Familiar hands, large and rough, uncared for. He didn’t flinch, or react in any which way, just continued to stare out the window. He surveyed the grounds beneath him, feeling this settled contentment deep in his chest, that led to a lazy smile growing on his lips.

“Hey, Nathan,” Pickles said.

“Hey,” Nathan said, softer than usual. He dipped his head and pressed his nose into Pickles’s neck; Pickles moved his head towards the side to make it more comfortable for him. One of Nathan’s hands pushed downwards, dipping below the band of Pickles’s briefs and onto his hip, while the other dragged upwards, finding Pickles’s left nipple.

“Are you drunk?” Pickles asked, propping an eyebrow up. Nathan took his nose away from his neck to look him in the eyes. Green on green.

“No,” Nathan said. “I’m the opposite of that. The opposite of drunk.”

“Sober,” Pickles said, and he laughed. He leaned forward to press his forehead into Nathan’s. “The word is sober.”

“Yeah, whatever,” Nathan said. His thumb brushed over Pickles’s nipple—Pickles shivered in response—while his other hand moved towards the cleft of Pickles’s ass. Pickles sighed a little, loving sigh, and surged forward, jamming their lips together.

On the stove, the porridge burned until it caught fire.


	7. the things they are and are not

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Skwisgaar and Toki. Sometimes things don’t end well. Skwisgaar/Toki, warning for major character death. Another one I'm pretty fond of.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written before Doomstar.

He’s going to regret the last time he told him he loved him for the rest of his life.

They were in Paris—France—and it was fitting. They played a show and then slipped out from the rest of the band, itching to feel young again. To be free. They took seedy back alleys to avoid being recognized; they fucked in the corner of one, they told each other they loved each other without words, but it wasn’t the last time. The last time came later. They worked their way into a tiny little bar and played pretend like they didn’t know each other, like they were meeting for the first time.

It reminded him of how  _old_ he was getting, really. Seeing him like that, his elbows on the tabletop and his strong back curved. His body like a tree trunk, strong and sturdy, the foundation of all things stable. He had slid into the seat beside him, put his own elbows on the table, asked him if he wanted a drink.

He’d laughed in his face. “Not from you,” he had said. Not in English, in one of their languages, that they had learned to better communicate with the other.

“Oh, I think you do,” he had said. He pulled his wallet from his pocket and opened it, letting the proof his affluence flash. An old trick. He took a credit card out and flagged the bartender.

“So you’re not leaving.” He twirled the straw around on the drink he already had, leaned his body in towards him, curled his hair around his hair Unmistakable signs of attraction.

“I never am,” he said, voice soft, hollow. A pick-up line and a promise.

“Maybe I never want you to.”  He leaned in close, then. They were not great actors. He put a hand on his thigh; it didn’t matter whose was what. “Maybe I want you for the rest of my life.” His voice dropped with his eyes, both directed at his lips that he kept in a hard line.

“We’ve only just met,” he said, and it was barely above a whisper. “Don’t make such irrational promises.” He pulled back, paid for their drinks, gave him hard liquor. A dangerous move for dangerous men.

His hand was on his thigh, the fingers digging in. They couldn’t act to save their lives. “I know ways we can get better acquainted.” Elbows on the table. Twirling the straw. Fingers in his thigh. Low voice, low eyes, lips hard in a straight line.

“You should show me.”

And he did.  _He_ fucked  _him_  in the bathroom of a grimy Parisian bar, curled his hands in his hair and held his head back so all he saw was the ceiling, the ceiling of a grimy Parisian bar bathroom. He screamed loud as he could and he responded by curling his fingers harder, yanking his hair, his long body splayed and breaking and his fingers curling around the top of the stall they were fucking against. They expressed their love for each other but it wasn’t the last time. The last time came later.

Sitting somewhere, their feet hanging off a ledge. Sharing something, a pastry they couldn’t pronounce. Sharing something, smiles and feelings. Hands on thighs, feet off the ledge, lights of the city in the foreground, some old building in the background. Ready to crumble, ready to fall, ready to kill them all.

They’d gotten themselves into a fight. Not an unfamiliar occurrence. Feet off the ledge, lights of the city in the foreground, a part of history in the background, and they in the middle, standing on this ledge. “Fucks you,” he said, ineloquent.

“Fucks you back!” His voice tipped in pitch when he yelled, anger rising in his pitch and in his cheeks, red-hot and screeching. “Oh  _waits_.” A serpent’s tongue, bitter intonation. “I alreadys  _did_.” He meant it as an insult. He meant  _it_ as an insult. The thing they did, their bodies together, an insult.

It caught him by surprise. Sex was many things. Sex was not an insult. He didn’t know what to say. Ready to crumble, ready to fall, ready to kill them all, architecture quiet on both sides. In focus and in distance. There was nobody around. The night was quiet; he could see  _stars_  and he could see  _light_ and he could see his _eyes_ , narrowed with something that was not quite hate. Definitely not love.  _Love_. Make it hurt. Use against him what he had used against you. “I loves you,” he said. He meant it as an insult.

Memory gets fuzzy. They made up, eventually, of course they did, that was almost a month before. They got in trouble for sneaking off for hours in the early morning; the sun rose as they were yelled at, told they were irresponsible and immature. They weren’t speaking to each other then, their arms crossed over their chest and their heads cast in separate directions. Separated. Feet planted firmly on the ground, knees open, lewd. Mirroring each other’s stance; unmistakable signs of attraction; they were never good actors—

He’s going to regret the last time he told him he loved him for the rest of his life. He could say it now, but he’s forgotten the words in all three languages he’s familiar with. Some part of him knows that what he feels is love, looking down, but he can’t express it. He can’t make his mouth move, or the muscles in his tongue work, or his hands stop shaking.

“Well,” somebody says. “I’ll, uh. I’ll arrange for the body to be. Disposed of.” The owner of the voice drops his head and pinches the bridge of his nose, hard. “Guys. Guys. Let’s just go. Guys.” He keeps repeating it. He can’t hear him. He doesn’t understand what it means. His hands won’t stop shaking. He can’t move. Nothing is moving.

“This is  _sad_.” An accent. Nails on a chalkboard. It puts him in motion and he’s on his knees; he can’t remember the fall but he can feel it in his bones. His hands won’t stop shaking and they shake the whole way down, he grabs the front of his shirt and holds it in his hands.

“I can’t watch this.” Who cares who said it? He can’t even hear them. Lowers his head to his chest. Puts his ear where his heartbeat should be. Hears nothing. Hands won’t stop shaking.

“Skwisgaar.” He doesn’t recognize his name.

“Buddy.” Somebody crouches beside him.

“He’s  _dead_.” Some part of him knows this. Some part of him refuses to believe it. Some other part of him is living that realization over and over in succession.

He’s going to regret the last time he told him he loved him. His hands won’t stop shaking. For the rest of his life.


	8. For the Cause

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lavona Succoboso, Seth, grimy Australian bars and vague conspiracy plots.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Written as a sort of challenge.

From outside, the bar is unimpressive. She stands with her feet apart and a hand on the hip, the other shielding her eyes from the harsh Australian sun. The bar is located off the highway, a squat square with a small parking lot, spruces springing up around the building and the windows blacked out. It’s called  _Joey’s_ ; in the parking lot are three vehicles: a dusty red truck, a motorcycle, and a black sports car. She squints her eyes harder and steps her feet together, starts to walk.

A bell chimes when she walks in. Inside is as barren as outside, a few tables, a bar. At the bar is a man. She recognizes him without even seeing his face: the gelled hair, looking dead in this poor lighting, the sweater vest and khaki pants, a misrepresentation of his personality. She keeps walking, never stopping, and sits beside him. He turns to look at her.

One of her underlings had told her about him. She knew of his existence before that, of course. He is the brother of her target’s best friend, a terrible man with a job inside of Dethklok. A terrible man but a  _useful_ man. Her underling told her that he was willing to negotiate.

“Deliver me at once,” she had told her underling.  She was put on a plane to Australia, the next flight out, and arrived at the airport an hour ago. She had been driven to the bar by an associate and now here she is, staring at this man, at her new ally. He is grinning. It is unsettling.

“Why, hello,” he says, and he has a voice like vinegar. The antithesis of honey: though smooth, it is sour, harsh on the tongue, hard to swallow it. She swallows it like a pro.

* * *

“There is something I think you might be able to help me with.”

“Yeah, tell me about it.”

Lighting low and grimy, drinks and hands and a chaste distance apart. Her posture is rigid, his slouched, and she narrows her eyes at him. He grins—he is always grinning, a lecherous man—and shakes his glass, scotch on the rocks, ice cubes clinging inside. He claims to be sober, carries a chip in his pocket.

“Your brother is too close to my target,” she says. She lifts her drink to her mouth and sips. Bitter.

“What do you want me to do about that?” He puts a hand on her thigh and she allows it, for it will help her to her overall cause.

“ _Separate them_.” She takes his hand off her thigh and stood up.

* * *

The next time they meet in the bar he shows her a picture of his family.

“Quaint,” she says, and she spits the word. She takes his wallet from his hand and puts the picture back inside before returning it to him. He gets the hint—he grins, but he is scared of her, they are  _all_  scared of her—and pockets the wallet. “Have you been successful in your efforts?”

“I’ve been trying, it’s just real fuckin’ hard, y’know, he won’t fuckin’ talk to me, I gotta find a way to get him to fuckin’ talk to me.” He flags the bartender down and orders a scotch on the rocks. She wonders if the chip is in his pocket. The first time they met he had flashed it at her, told her he’d gone two years sober, before ordering them both a drink.

“However hard it is, you try harder.” She sets her jaw and crosses her arms and legs. “I am prepared to leave and find somebody else for the job. You are not proving yourself. You are not worth the money I am paying you.”

“No!” He says, and he puts both hands on her thighs, looks her straight in the eyes. “I’ll try, okay, I’ll try super fucking hard, I’ll get them the fuck apart, just give me some time, I need some time. My wife—“

“I don’t care about your family.” She removes his hands. “You have one more chance.”

She leaves. She knows he watches her walk out the door and sashays her hips just the slightest bit more. If it would help her cause, it was worth it.

* * *

His breath stinks. Not an organic odor, unwashed and unclean, but of booze. He is already drunk and blubbering as she leans in close to hear the faint words he spoke.

“I  _failed_ ,” he said. He moaned and put his head in his hands, a vein throbbing in his forehead. “I fuckin’ failed, okay, I can’t get them apart, I don’t know what’s up with ‘em but I can’t get Pickles to fuckin’  _talk_ to me, I’m so done, I’m so dead—“

“Shut up,” she hisses. She stood up to stand behind him, places a hand on his shoulder, leans in close to his face. “You have the power to unsettle Pickles as not many men do. Pickles is standing between me and the ultimate cause. I need you on this, Seth.” She digs her nails into his shoulder.

Seth turns around in his barstool, grabs her hand from his back and holds it between both of his. Grinning. “You never told me your name,” he says, and he brings her hand to his clammy, chapped lips to kiss it.

“Lavona,” she says, and in the back of her mind,  _it will help my cause_.

“Lavona,” he echoes, moving his lips against her hand. “Pretty name for a pretty girl.”

She rips her hand away and glared at him. “Try harder,” she says, and she leaves.

* * *

“I  _think_ ,” he slurs, words barely intelligible under the heavy fog of alcohol. “That you’re fucking  _into_ me and I’m into  _fucking_ you, y’know? We should do it. Forget the fuckin’ cause, man, forget fuckin’ Dethklok, they suck, their music sucks, Pickles sucks—let’s just fuck. Get it over with. C’mon.” He slumps his entire body into hers, forehead into her shoulder, arms around her waist, legs mingling with hers.

“I don’t want you,” she says. “I want him. That is why I am doing this. It is for my cause.” She does not hold him back. He rolls his forehead against her shoulder, nuzzles her collarbone.

“You smell so  _good_ ,” he says. It’s a lie. She smells of nothing.

“You are disgusting,” she says. It’s a fact. He grins into her shoulder, drops his head to lean against her breast. “Remove yourself from me at once.” No intonation; he does not follow through. She is curious to see what he will do next.

“Fuck Pickles, man,” he says, and he laughs this broken laugh into her chest. Shakes his head. She knows, then, that it’s futile. “Fuck ‘em all. Why live like this, you know? Why fuckin’ live like this.” Drunk words from a drunk man and she is letting her guard down for it.

She pushes him off. “You disgust me,” she says, and it’s halfway between a fact and a lie. He disgusts her, yes, but like the words beneath his intoxicated utterings there is an intrigue under the heavy fog of disgust.

She doesn’t leave. They stay and they talk. Mostly about the cause, about how  _important_ it is, for him to understand and to act as she says, and about the money, about how much he’s getting and when. But they also talk, for only a handful of sentences, about his family, both immediate and extended and married-in, and she tells herself that it is all for the cause.

* * *

She puts a hand on his thigh and uses the other to tip his chin and look at her. “You cannot fail,” she speaks, as low as her voice will allow. She trails her finger along the underside of his chin. “It is so important.” She leans in and she kisses him.

She learned from a young age to use her beauty as a lure. It was a gift, not a curse, the way the men looked at her. She broke their hearts and left them to die. She sucked their souls dry. When she heard Dethklok she had heard her soul and knew she needed one final conquest, the ultimate conquest, the seed of the savior, the seed of Nathan Explosion. Where her beauty failed her she implemented her brains, and it led her here, to this grimy Australian bar with horrible music playing in the background and the swimmy eyes of a drunk and broken man. She cannot see his eyes; they are closed, as are hers, their lips held against each other.

He wiggles her tongue between her lips. He is not a good kisser, his tongue hot and heavy and unsexy in her mouth. She does the best she can, arches into him, kisses him. “This is for the cause,” she spells out against his mouth, using both tongue and lips. He seems to understand. His hands are on her hips and then they are dipping lower, the thumbs hooked into her waistline. His hands travel up her back and over her shoulders, down to her breasts, and they are making out at this bar and she is telling herself that it is all for the cause, for her one true love, her final conquest, that she is doing this.

She doesn’t let him fuck her, doesn’t let him do anything besides explore her body. His fingers slip into her pants and she grinds into them, gets herself off. It’s release; some part of her that has been wound tight for a long time unwinds and it feels alright. She doesn’t get him off, leaves him with a tent in his pants and the ice melted in his drink. Fuck him. She will not fuck him.

* * *

“I can’t,” he says. He places his sobriety chip in front of her. “Can’t fuckin’ get them apart, Lavona, look, it’s fuckin’ useless.”

She takes his chip and places it on her mouth, keeping her lips parted and playing with it. She doesn’t speak, only rolls the chip between her cheeks and along her teeth. It tastes like how he smells: rancid.

“I’m so sorry,” he says. He’s not grinning. “I still want the money, I mean, I tried so hard, and I think it’s only fair.” She doesn’t respond, just sucks on the chip and flicks it out of her lips like a lizard’s tongue. He watches her play with it and then, frustrated, pries into her mouth with his fingers and retrieves the chip. “Fuckin’ talk to me, Lavona,” he says, placing the chip in her palm and holding her hands closed in his.

“You are useless and I no longer have a use for you,” she says. He strokes a thumb over her hand. “Go home to your family. To your wife. Forget about Dethklok and your brother, you pitiful man. Let us who know what we are doing take care of it.”

“Lavona,” he says.

“This is our final meeting,” she says.

“Let me fuck you. Please.” He is begging, his fingers are moving over her hand, his sobriety chip is burning into her palm.

“I don’t fuck men who beg for me,” she says, and it’s a lie, because those are the  _only_ men she fucks. She rips her hands from his and puts the chip back in her mouth. His hands follow and then his mouth; she pushes the chip through his lips in lieu of her tongue and they’re sucking on the edges of it, the both of them.

She pushes him onto the floor in the women’s bathroom, his head right by the door, and rips his shirt open. She drags her nails down his chest and towards his dick, around but not on it, takes his hands and puts one on her clothed breast and pushes the other down her pants. He dips his fingers inside of her and she growls, tells him no with a slap to the face. He rubs her clit and she rubs his face; an affirmation. She keeps him pinned to the ground with a hand on his chest while she pushes her pants down, then unzips his pants, lowers them just enough to expose his dick. It’s small, of course it is, and she lowers onto it. She presses both of her hands into his hips to keep him from bucking as she fucks him, up and down, up and down, until he comes inside her. She gets off but does not voice her orgasm.

She slings her legs over his side and pulls her pants back up, leaves him crying on the bathroom floor as she shakes the fuck off and exits. She realizes that the sobriety chip is still in her mouth and spits it out.

* * *

From outside, the bar is unimpressive. It is pitiful. She stands with her feet wide apart and a hand on her hip, the other hand shielding her eyes from the harsh Australian sun. Inside she knows he is still crying, tears pinched in his eyes. He was a broken man before she met him which makes it no fun, but it’s another conquest for her. A small one, not the ultimate one, but a conquest nonetheless. She digs her foot into the sand of the desert and imagines his heart beneath her, shriveled and black and stinking of formaldehyde.

Her ride pulls up. She hears it, hears the engine stall while the driver, her associate, waits for her. He is on time. She does not turn around but stares at the bar.  _Joey’s_ , written on the blacked-out window.  _Joey’s_ , in weathered letters along the flat roof. She curls her lip at it. It is pathetic, really, and not worth her time. Her tongue tastes like the inside of his pockets, of sweat and regret.

She digs her boots in harder, lets sand splatter along the top, squeezes her hip with her hand. Reminds herself that she is alive and that the ultimate cause is not dead even if this  _was_  a dead-end. She imagines Seth rolled onto his stomach on the bathroom floor, tiny dick trapped between his stomach and the filthy floor, letting his tears roll down his face and collect underneath him, and she smiles.

She turns around and she leaves.


	9. A Serious Case of Cilantro Poisoning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Toki and Skwisgaar have a lover's spat. Sort of. Skwisgaar/Toki.

Looking back, Toki probably shouldn't have done that. He realizes this as he looks down at Skwisgaar, looking unsettled in sleep due to the unfavorable condition of his face and skin, in his hospital bed. Toki is standing and has been for the last hour and a half, his feet starting to hurt in the arches, but he can't make himself sit down. He feels guilt grabbing at his gut, fingers pinching his intestines. He really shouldn't have done that.

Behind him, the door opens. He can't make himself look around, only at Skwisgaar, at the bloating of his cheeks and the discoloration of his once fair skin. Somebody places a hand on his shoulder, smells of booze and speaks in a harsh accent. "You really shouldn't have done that, Toki."

Toki sighs, his sigh evolving into a groan the further it continues on. "I knows," he says, slapping himself on the forehead. With somebody else in the room he finds he can sit down and so he drops himself into the chair beside Skwisgaar's bed.

Pickles hands Toki a bottle of liquor. "Figured you might need it," Pickles says.

"Thank, Pickle," Toki says. He unscrews the caps off the bottle and brings it to his mouth, swallowing a good portion before taking it away. "I feels…guilty, I think." "

Well," Pickle says. He moves Skwisgaar's hand and sits on his bed, which pisses Toki off in a minute and subconscious manner. "You almost killed the guy."

"He was beings a real jerk!" Toki says. He pauses and takes another drink, wipes the back of his mouth. It's true, but he can't shake this guilt. 

"What did he do, exactly?"

Toki furrowed his eyebrows, fixed his lips into a pout. "He broked my real cools model airplanes," Toki said. "Just gets out of bed and breaks it!"

"Whoa, wait. He was in your bed?" Pickles looks between Skwisgaar and Toki, then gives a little half-shrug. "Whatever. Doesn't give you the right to poison him, dude."

"I didn't poisons him!" Toki takes another drink. He's starting to feel tipsy; he hasn't had anything to eat since the airplane incident that morning, during which he had been eating strawberries in bed, sucking the juice out of the ends. "I only slips him a little cilantro."

"He's allergic to cilantro."

"I knows dat." More alcohol.

Pickles leans forward and takes the bottle from Toki's mouth, spilling liquid down his shirt. Toki wraps his hands around the bottle and when Pickles tugs it away he tugs Toki towards him, Pickles falling back over Skwisgaar's midsection and Toki on top of him. This doesn't wake Skwisgaar up but Toki feels the guilt wash over him, a wave of it, an actual wave, and stands up from the bed, shame ebbing at him.

"Just apologize when he wakes up, geeze," Pickles mutters. He exits the room and brings the bottle of booze with him. Toki's sad to see them go, though more for the booze than for Pickles.

Defeated, he falls into the chair beside Skwisgaar's bed and falls asleep himself, feeling thoroughly miserable at the state of affairs. He awakes sometime later to the sound of somebody rustling around in the room, getting dressed or packing up, if the sound of a zipper is any inclination. He opens his eyes, stuck together with sleep, to see a shirtless, deflated and uncolored Skwisgaar standing before him, holding his shirt in his hands and his hands at his hips.

"You tries to poisons me!" Skwisgaar says as soon as Toki's eyes focus, pointing an accusing finger at him. "Dat ams de last time we sleeps in yous room. Whats next, you tries to suffocakes me with a pillow?"

Toki rubs at his eyes. "I's sorry!" He says, then he frowns. "Waits, no I's not! It takes me three days to build dat plane-"

"I steps on it by acksidents, maybe you shouldn't be leavingks your plains on de floor!"

Toki leaps to his feet and mirrors Skwisgaar's stance, balling fists against his hipbones. "We knocks it off last night when you pushes me into my desk! It ams you's fault!"

"It ams you's fault for beingks such a babies! Now I's all poisoned in de hospitals." Skwisgaar puts his shirt on as a sort of punctuation, a closing argument to his contention. This only serves to make Toki even more pissed off. Skwisgaar's being a dick and Toki can't even look at him shirtless.

"If you ams poisoned you ams dead," Toki says, drawing the words out as slow as he can. He knows Skwisgaar isn't stupid but he's acting like he is and so Toki adjusts his argument. "And you ams not dead! I couldn't kills you because it would makes me sad, you dick! I hates you!"

Skwisgaar pauses in pulling his shirt down, arches his eyebrow. "Babies," he says, but he says it softer, more fondly.

"Jerk," Toki says, much in the same manner.

Skwisgaar closes whatever space is left between Toki and kisses him.

Outside, Pickles pulls back from the door and faces Nathan and Murderface. "You guys owe me ten bucks," he says, before flouncing away, bottle of booze in hand.


	10. Lost and Found and Lost Again

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr Request: Skwisgaar finds Toki in the Revengencer's hideout. Skwisgaar/Toki. Written before Doomstar.

At Charles’s request Skwisgaar is sitting in his office, boots on the corner of his desk and guitar in his lap. He’s doing his best to arrange his face into an expression of apathy, fingers idle in the formation of a chord, muscles still. Charles sits in the chair behind the desk, his hands folded in front of him, fingers crossed over each other. He’s pale and his suit looks like something you’d attend a funeral in.

“Skwisgaar,” Charles begin. He clears his throat, flexes his hands, fixes his glasses, straightens his tie. Charles looks a mess, hair out of place and shirt buttoned wrong. “We’ve, ah.” Rearranges the pencils in their cup, tugs at his collar, neatens his hair. “Located.” Clears his throat again. “Toki.”

Skwisgaar’s first response is to let his eyebrows skyrocket, jump out of the chair, throw his guitar across the room and demand to know why the  _fuck_ he isn’t back,  _then_. Instead he does nothing but look at Charles, begs him to continue with his eyes. His fingers still on the strings.

“And we think that you are, uh. The best man. For the job. Of getting him.” Charles sounds like a broken robot, his face twitching. He gets up from his desk and walks across the room, doesn’t wait for Skwisgaar to respond before he starts talking again, his hands clasped behind his back. “Go, Skwisgaar. Go  _now_. The helicopter’s in place. Get him back. Go. Go!” His voice rises in pitch, spilling the most emotion Skwisgaar has ever heard from the man. Skwisgaar’s looking in the corner of Charles’s office and not seeing anything.

Skwisgaar takes his heavy boots off the corner of the desk. They make this huge, hollow sound against the wood of the floor that echoes as he walks. He leaves the guitar behind. He follows the twists and turns of Mordhaus until he is standing on a helicopter pad and being fitted, high-tech armor placed over his clothes. They tie his hair back in a knot at the end of his head and slip a microphone up through the front of his vest, a small and transparent camera sticking to his forehead. He wonders, absently, when they developed this technology. His fingers feel numb.

They shuffle him into the helicopters and shout muffled jargon back and forth to each other about clearing landing zones and take off times. Skwisgaar falls into a seat towards the back of the helicopter, stares ahead, again without seeing anything. He’s catatonic, lost in his thoughts. He’s trying to remember the last time he talked, really  _talked_ to Toki. He thinks that it was when they were alone in the living room of Mordhaus, one of Toki’s legs drawn up on the couch and his foot pressed into his thigh, facing each other. Skwisgaar practiced a solo while Toki told him about this reoccurring nightmare he’d been having about his father.               

A band member, Toki had said, would turn into his father while they were at a show, or eating dinner, or just palling around, and he would talk to Toki in Norwegian except Toki wouldn’t understand the words and then he’d produce a whip and beat Toki almost to death. He’d wake up on his final breath, Toki had said.

Then, Toki had cast his eyes down, red rising in his cheeks. “I doesn’t knows why I tells you dis,” he had mumbled to the couch cushions. “You doesn’t cares.”

Immediately: “Doesn’t says dat.” Toki flicked his eyes up to Skwisgaar, this girlish look of disbelief and amazement on his face. Skwisgaar rolled his eyes, bit his tongue. “I means, whatever.” But it was enough, the talking it through, Skwisgaar’s passive taking, his comment. It was enough for Toki to feel better. That had been a few weeks before he’d been taken. It played in Skwisgaar’s mind, over and over again, Toki’s eyes, the red in his cheeks, his  _face_. Skwisgaar had laid in bed every night remembering Toki’s face and his voice, willing himself not to forget it.

The helicopters lands. They place this huge gun in Skwisgaar’s hands, tell him how to fire it. He practices, shooting a target, and finds that the guns makes no sound and the target melts when the bullet hits it. Again he wonders where they had the time and the money to come up with this stuff. It’s all he can think about, these tangible things, as he continues to see nothing and loses the feeling in his fingers. He is flanked from all around by a group of soldier Klokateers as they move out of the helicopter and into the compound, all armed with the same weapon, and Skwisgaar finds that his mission isn’t so much as to kill as the Klokateers’ is to protect him. The Klokateers are good at their job, their weaponry advanced, and they lose only three men with one more injured on the way. The melted bodies, this sickly orange color from the combination of blood and skin, flood the floor. Skwisgaar is responsible for no deaths and his calves are aching from the running, the strain of his suit, by the time they reach what he guesses is Toki’s room. It’s at the end of a long and strongly lit hallway, a double door with bars on the windows. The Klokateers open the door with a key stolen from a Revengencer, peel away and let Skwisgaar enter, alone.

“Skwisgaar!” There is a flash of a person and then there are arms around Skwisgaar’s neck and Skwisgaar can’t help it, he wraps his arms around Toki. He feels smaller, his muscle mass wilted away, but Skwisgaar supposes that he was sort of expecting that. They cling to each other for a few minutes and Skwisgaar swallows back lumps and tears before Toki pulls away and Skwisgaar gets a look at him. They’ve shaved him and cut his hair short, fraying boyishly at the ends. He’s wearing a yellow t-shirt and frayed denim cut-offs, barefoot. He’s tan, a sunburn on the ridges of his cheeks, light freckling on his collarbone and forearms like they’ve had him in the garden. He looks so young, the youngest Skwisgaar has ever seen him, even when he was nineteen and new in Dethklok. No, Toki looks that sort of eternal young that the ghosts of the dead get, and it’s creeping Skwisgaar out and he can’t make himself speak. Toki talks, instead. “They’s has me outside, planting de dead bodies in de garden,” Toki says, his head bobbing with the words. There’s a chirp in his voice; he sounds far, far too gleeful, and Skwisgaar is far, far too afraid.

“Tokis,” Skwisgaar says, when he finds his voice. He puts his hands on Toki’s shoulders, his fingers making spider webs to cover Toki’s knobby bones. “What they does to you?”

Toki’s mouth twitches and starts to form words before falling. His eyes fill up with tears and then his head is against Skwisgaar’s chest, his back hunched, rubbing his tears into Skwisgaar’s bulletproof vest. “Skwisgaar, Skwisgaar, Skwisgaar,” he says, sniffling, probably smearing snot all over. “You’s all I thinks about, you’s all I wants. They’s treats me goods, I swears. I asks for yous and they brings me you! Ams we going homes now?”

“Tokis,” Skwisgaar says again. His hands are on Toki’s back, moving up and down. He has a sudden and fierce desire to see Toki’s scars, to check for some validation that this is still his Toki, not some imposter. They will tell him, later, after the doctors look Toki over, after the psychiatrists conduct extensive sessions with him, that while he is unharmed physically, his psychological state has been all but shattered, and that the bodies he planted in the garden were men that he killed on behalf of the Revengencers, men that he enjoyed killing, and that he grew vegetables from their decomposing bodies underneath a layer of soil, turnips and carrots and squash. He doesn’t know that in the moment, though, in the moment all he can do is rub Toki’s back up and down, say his name, over and over, they’re saying each other’s names into each other.

Skwisgaar nudges Toki off of him to look at his face. He looks uneven and uneasy like this, without a curtain of hair and the mustache to frame his mouth. His mouth especially, the lips thin and cold, chapped. Skwisgaar lowers his to Toki’s, wants to force-feed him his life back, wants to remind himself that Toki is still real. Toki blinks tears through his eyelashes into Skwisgaar’s cheek, takes the kiss passively.

The perfect man for the job, the pinnacle of apathy, Skwisgaar shouldn’t be affected. But Charles was wrong and Skwisgaar has the feeling in his hands back, can see the dirt beneath Toki’s fingernails. Toki is staining Skwisgaar, his lips and his tears and his touch, he’s creeping into him and making Skwisgaar care. He wants to turn back time, wants to take Toki into his arms on that couch and hold him and tell him that he won’t let the band members turn into visions of his father anymore, that he won’t let Magnus take him as long as he promises not to go to the funeral and to never speak to Magnus again. Skwisgaar pulls back from Toki’s face, runs his thumb over Toki’s lip, the action simple enough to peel flesh from Toki’s wrecked lips. Small flecks of his blood stick to Skwisgaar’s thumb and Toki doesn’t seem to notice.

The Klokateers reform the circle around them as they walk out of the room. Skwisgaar holds Toki’s hand like a mother holding a small child, leading them through a busy mall, keeping them safe of predators. Except the predators are all dead, the only predators left in the child’s head, and Skwisgaar can’t do a damn thing about it. 


	11. On the Nature of the Apocalypse

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They are not as important as they think they are. Dethklok, the apocalypse, and misunderstandings. Gen. Written before Doomstar.

They are not gods. They may have been designed to be gods, molded in godly shapes and given divine attributes, but somewhere along the way it was decided that they would not be gods. They were barely messengers. If anything they were scapegoats, patsies, nothing but tools for the actual gods, the gods that would bring the apocalypse. These gods, without morals and interested solely in their individual motivations, masked the coming of the apocalypse with the metal music that one band happened to play. The gods had no hand in their meeting, in the convergence of five souls one day in an alley behind a bar. The gods had no hand in the shuffling of members and those associated with the band. The gods did not even care that the band had formed at first. There were more interesting things to watch, namely war breaking out between countries and disease outbursts. At the time of the band’s conception there was a particularly tragic romance going on in Indonesia that had the attention of half of the deities. As time rolled on, they realized that now would be the perfect time to insert the apocalypse, noticed that this band called Dethklok was getting sort of popular in the United States, and with a swipe of their hands, the future was planned.

Everything was a lie and the humans had it all wrong. It was intentional. As the world prepared to either align with those against Dethklok or die for Dethklok, the gods laughed mighty thunder of laughter. They had it  _wrong_ , so  _wrong_ , they were destroying the earth  _for_ them, those stupid humans. The gods told themselves that their new playthings would be better designed, their new world infinitely more interesting. They had taken a slow, evolutionary approach to this existence, and were not fond of the outcome. Humanity was stupid and predictable and they felt that they had seen the same stories play out far too many times. The ideas that the humans had for their future were trite, uninspired. The gods could do better.

Dethklok did not know this. They didn’t know their efforts were futile. They didn’t know their fallen friend didn’t make a difference. They died one-by-one.

The first was the easiest: a stab wound to the side, his stomach bleeding its contents out down his formal pants, he died in the clutches of his murderer as the man dragged him from the scene.

The second was the hardest: an assassin in the middle of the night, creeping into the huge bed of the head of the band, a ritualistic sword plunged through the base of the skull and out through the mouth. There had been a messy fight that left the assassin themselves dead, their intestines wrapped around their throat. They bled out, side-by-side, enemies, onto the scarlet sheets of the man’s bed.

The third was a suicide. The bassist perished by his own hand, a sawed-off shotgun above the ear, the sound echoing in the bathroom and his brain and blood a piece of art on the mirror. The manager discovered him and had the body disposed of discretely, told the remaining members of the bands what had happened. That is when they, the last two, figured it out. It was futile, their efforts, and fate (the gods chuckled—there was no such thing as  _fate_ ) had other plans for them.

The four and fifth were suicides, also, but those of cowardice. Sitting cross-legged and facing each other on the bed, two cyanide pills perpendicular on the sheets, a bottle of vodka. Work up some courage. Passed between them; half the bottle gone; take the pill, crush it between your teeth. Swallow. Fall.

And the world, too, it fell. The gods slowed time. The buildings spilled over themselves floor-by-floor. The fire licked the sky, warmed the gods’ feet. A dramatic battle between the manager, his army, and all those that opposed them. The god cut it short then, sick of this shit. They split the earth in two and let the occupants topple down into space, suffocate, erased their souls.

They’d do better next time, they told themselves.


	12. Welcome to Existence

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Small fic written before Doomstar (that still fits in with canon.) Skwisgaar/Toki.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> literally just nabbed the title from the song I'm listening to at the moment (Dare You to Move by Switchfoot) lmfao

It felt good to hold him again, to run his hands through his hair and down his body, to feel the proof that he still existed beneath his hands. He could feel the muscles, now worn thin with overuse and abuse, the hair, the skin, the scars, all of it, in his arms, and it felt good. It was the best feeling he’d experienced in his life, far greater than booze or drugs or sex with whores or even sex with him, that unspeakable and unmentionable thing that had been going on for years, their bodies pressed between their sheets. No, the best feeling–better than even playing the guitar–was the tactile feel of him beneath his hands.

“I ams so happies you ams back, Toki,” Skwisgaar said.


	13. Toki Watch

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr Request: Nathan/Toki post season 4. Written before Doomstar but still fits in with the canon, somewhat.

After Toki returns it is decided and agreed upon that he should not be left alone. They take shifts, Skwisgaar staying in the night, Charles in the mornings, Pickles in the afternoons, Murderface during the evenings, and Nathan filling the gaps left by his bandmates’ flighty attendance records. Nathan sits on the edge of Toki’s bed while he sleeps through whole days, hair braided into a knot at the base of his skull so that he won’t pull strands of it out as he has been prone to doing. Nathan escorts Toki to the bathroom, averts his eyes when Toki sinks into the tub, new scars running the length of his body, no longer confined to his back. Nathan lunges at Toki and holds his arms behind his back when Toki will begin to kick and scream, not living in the present moment but in the past, Nathan never knowing if Toki is seeing Magnus or his father before him.

It is all Toki wants to be alone, Toki has told Nathan, but other people tell Nathan things too, words such as  _suicide watch_ and  _psychotic break_ flowing from the lips of Charles and doctors. Nathan understands these phrases but chooses to ignore their meaning, act dumb. Strong paternal flames burn in his belly, reaching up to brush his heart. Toki is  _theirs_. Toki is  _his._ Toki has been hurt, and now they have to deal with the ramifications.

Nathan scrubs the blood and brains of a Klokateer that Toki had attacked with his spiked baseball bat in the night while Skwisgaar had left to use the bathroom, Skwisgaar waking Nathan from his sleep after returning to find Toki gory and cowering in the corner. Nathan and Skwisgaar greet Charles with sheepish and tentative smiles when he comes to take his shift, Nathan holding the blood-soaked rag behind his back while Skwisgaar looks up from trying to coax Toki from the corner. They expect a lecture on forgetfulness and are surprised to see Charles go around Nathan and take the rag from him, getting on his own hands and knees to scrub at the remnants of the Klokateer. “Go,” he tells them. “It’s my turn now.”

They’re supposed to be recording the record that will somehow stop the apocalypse, kill Salacia and fix everything, but instead they sit around, morose, always missing two members. Toki doesn’t leave his wing of Mordhaus, spends his days muttering nonsense to himself or to the string of therapists that pass through his door. Sometimes when Murderface is on Toki watch the three contributing members of the band try to write something but they know it’s not right, it never was right, they need everybody in full now more than ever. Nathan thinks that they’ll never have Dethklok returned in full, that although Toki’s physical body is there with them his mind is just as gone as ever, but he doesn’t tell the band this. The rest of them look so goddamned  _sad_ all the time, and besides, musing about the soul of your friend is totally gay and not metal.

It’s when three more Klokateers perish at Toki’s hands, that spiked baseball bat swinging into the gut of a girl Klokateer while Pickles is passed out drunk on the floor, Toki’s bare hands wrapping around the neck of a burly bodyguard while Murderface leaves to get snacks, Toki stabbing another one to death with one of the knives he used to make models in the empty space between Charles’s and Pickles’s shifts, that Nathan’s entire job becomes looking after Toki. He’s the strongest member of the band, the one that can hold onto Toki for the amount of time needed to jam a needle in his neck and sedate him, the loudest voice to call for help. He sleeps on the floor beside Toki’s bed, curled up in the blanket from his own room, staring at the mass of Toki and feeling vaguely afraid for his life. He is there when Toki wakes up and rolls over in bed, his eyes unfocused and mouth slack. He watches as Klokateers sometimes feed Toki his meals, other times as Toki lifts the food to his mouth and chews long and deliberate, wincing.

It’s exhausting. Nathan hasn’t been so tired in years. The others join him, resuming their previous schedule, keeping him company, Skwisgaar on the floor beside him, Charles telling him in a quiet voice about the intricacies of the prophecy, Pickles playing cards on Toki’s desk with him, Murderface irritating him with the insistence that heshould be the one to watch after Toki. Through the days Toki is either asleep or catatonic, dressed in pajama bottoms, nails cut short so he won’t scratch himself. He’s been getting worse, not better, and there has been talk of moving him to some sort of facility. Nathan leaves the room when the doctors and therapists come, uses those periods as an escape.

If Toki recovers one day—if he leaves his bed for a reason other than to make a trip to the bathroom or murder somebody in the middle of the night—Nathan hopes that Toki looks back on these empty months and feels some gratitude. But, as Nathan’s back hits the stone wall outside Toki’s room as a new line-up of specialists from Finland trickle into Toki’s room, he wouldn’t care either way. He would take a punch in the face if it meant Toki came back in full.


	14. Ice Cream and Amusement Parks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ice Cream and Amusement Parks. Tumblr Request: I challenge you to write Magnus/Toki pre-betrayal stabbing. Magnus/Toki.

He gave him attention, and that's what he liked most of all. The band didn't give a fuck about him. They didn't even try to pretend that they cared about him. Even saving him from camp was an act of selfishness, more about revenge for themselves than about concern over Toki, and Toki didn't have to take that sort of shit. Toki could be his own man, could have his own friends, and Magnus was there for him. He looked out for Toki at camp because he cared about him, not because of some old feud, and he hung around afterwards, calling Toki nightly. Toki grew attached fast. He always did.

Magnus took him to places that Toki wanted to go to, ice cream parlors and amusement parks, loomed in the background while Toki rode rollercoasters or ordered sundaes. Toki would drag Magnus in with him, getting him to ride beside him on carousels and chatter while he licked the inside of a waffle cone. He coaxed smiles from Magnus, drew stories from him, got him to talk to him. Magnus opened up, though it took a while, and Toki felt happy, he did. It was a natural progression to layer a hand over his while they sat at a table in a restaurant, comparing days. Magnus returned the touch and fixed his face into something like anger, before softening and running a thumb over Toki's hand. Unspoken. They kissed goodnight.

Metal musicians were so brooding, so quiet, and Toki was used to this treatment. He went along anyway, bouncing and happy and smiles, unaware of what was come, blaming Magnus's behavior on prior knowledge in relation to Dethklok. Kisses and touches lingered and soon Toki was professing his undying love, getting nothing in return, and he didn't care at all.


	15. Psych Ward Tango

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr Request: Write a fic where Toki says "He ran intos my knife. He ran intos my knife ten times. Warning for character death.

“Toki! The fuck, dude?” Pickles drops the bottle of beer he’d been holding, translucent green glass shattering and thick black liquid oozing across the floor.

Toki turns around, veins in his face and red in his eyes bulging, blood splatters coating his clothes. “He rans intos my knifes,” Toki said, his voice a little shrill. “He rans intos my knifes ten times.”

Pickles looks down at what may be the corpse of his lead guitarist. He wants to kick him to see if he’s alive but he’s barefoot and doesn’t want to walk through glass. “Toki…is Skwisgaar still…alive?”

“What de fucks does you thinks, Pickles?” Toki asks. He rolls his eyes, his grip on the knife tightening.

Pickles gulps. He’s seen Toki like this before, bloody and crazed, and he doesn’t much feel like being his next victim. “I’m just…I’m gonna go now. Get another beer. Yeah. Bye, Toki.”

Pickles scurries off in the direction of Charles’s office. Charles folds his hands and sighs upon hearing the news, orders a clean-up crew both literally and figuratively, checks Toki into a hospital. Dethklok is done and also, upon visiting Toki, disturbed to find that Toki has made friends and musical numbers in the psych ward.


	16. catalyst

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gay preklok gross glam glitter sex. Nathan/Pickles. Another one I'm fond of.

His ears are full of holes with small, silver earrings sticking through them. He counts three flowers, a heart, two stars, a knife, a gun, and though there is the same amount of the same things on the other side, it is not symmetrical. He’s wearing neon green fingerless mesh gloves, his fingernails a chipped lilac, lipstick smeared around the microphone that he sings into like sucking a cock. His entire body is coated in a thin sheen of glitter, globs accumulating as he sweats. His hair is so red and so everywhere, frayed edges tickling Nathan’s face as he leans into the crowd, puts a hand on Nathan’s shoulder.

Nathan can’t believe he let Murderface talk him into this. “Come see my old friend,” Murderface had said in that annoying lisp. “Come see him in this stupid gay band.” Those exact words and Nathan had conceded, only because he had nothing better to do that night. They’re in a new city, a fringe to something big and great, just hanging out and wasting time. Building up to something, Nathan thinks. That’s what his dreams tell him. But he doesn’t know what they’re building up to yet, all he knows is that he works at a fast food joint, rooms with Murderface and is standing in the front row of a Snakes ‘n’ Barrels concert, close enough to the lead singer that he can swell the booze on his breath as he sings this dirty little song in Nathan’s face. Murderface is shrieking some emotion Nathan doesn’t have the intelligence to identify. Nathan doesn’t know how Murderface knows Pickles, doesn’t care enough.

He does something ballsy. He grabs a handful of Pickles’s hair and tugs, hard enough that Pickles stammers over the lyric he’d been singing. Nathan smiles this shit-eating smile and in that moment he’s hooked, he’s so fucking hooked. They’ll talk and laugh about this for years to come; Pickles well tell Nathan that the most romantic thing he’s ever said was when he confessed that this moment is when he falls in love. Nathan doesn’t know he’s in love right now, though. All he knows is that he works at a fast food joint, rooms with Murderface and is standing in the front row of a Snakes ‘n’ Barrels concert, close enough that the lead singer’s hand is wrapping around his shoulder, that he’s taking the microphone away and leaning down to Nathan’s ear, that he’s whispering in it, that’s he telling him, “See me after the show.”

Maybe it’s the androgyny. This is the first time Nathan’s ever fucked a dude and it doesn’t feel wrong or anything, his huge hands gripping Pickles’s small and tight ass as Pickles wraps his legs around his waist, naked. Glitter covers him like it’s his actual skin, shiny serpent scales, and he’s still wearing these horrendous pink cowboy boots and he’s still whispering these horrendous sultry things in Nathan’s ears. They’re in Pickles’s dressing room; Nathan can see himself in the mirror, his back against the opposite wall as he thrusts up. There’s wings of freckles on Pickles’s back.

Afterwards he’s walking funny, hips sore. He meets up with Murderface outside the venue; Murderface is pissing freely on the ground, teetering with drunkenness. When Murderface asks where Nathan was, Nathan tells him he was getting laid. Murderface will never find out the truth, will forget about the night down the road, that he was the catalyst for all of this.


	17. MPREGOCALYPSE

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mpreg epic. Skwisgaar/Toki, Nathan/Pickles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm not going to edit this so forgive the horrendous typos but it's the best thing i've ever written and is beautiful as is

“Gentlemen, we have a problem,” Stampington began. “It appears that Pickles the Drummer and Toki Wartooth have become…pregnant.”

“Pregnant?” Crozier exclaimed, tilting his chin upwards. “That’s impossible. They’re men.”

“It has been made possible through some dark and terrible magic that Pickles’s brother Seth _found_. It seems that he cursed both of them when Toki took some of the poisoned alcohol from Pickles. The poison causes whoever drinks it to become pregnant with the seed of the next person they sleep with, male or female.”

“Well,” Crozier said, sounding thoroughly exasperated. “Do you know who the mothers are?”

“ _Fathers_ ,” Stampington corrected. “And Nathan Explosion and Skwisgaar Skwigelf, respectively. Here to tell us more is male pregnancy expert Dr. Greiegek.”

* * *

 

Charles did not expect this meeting to go well. There were many reasons: Murderface’s absence, the already poor morning shared by the band, the early hour. But the largest and most concerning reason was the fact that there were two ungodly fetuses festering in the sudden wombs of two-fifths of the world’s biggest band, fetuses placed there by copulation with other members of the band, _male_ members. Defying all science and logic, Toki and Pickles sat before him, both with their hands folded over miniscule baby bumps. They were each three months along, the telltale sign of morning sickness lost among the frequent hangovers, the pregnancies discovered upon a recent physical.

Charles took his seat at the head of the table and adjusted his tie. Toki and Pickles were aligned on the opposite side of the table as the fathers of their babies. Skwisgaar and Nathan were visibly disturbed, Skwisgaar’s fingers frozen in the riff he’d been playing when he first heard the news even though the guitar had been removed from his body, Nathan’s eyes wide and skin white as he trembled with fear. Toki was smiling in a drugged and unfocused way, Pickles rubbing his belly and looking at the table.

“Uh,” Charles began, clearing his throat. “Guys. We have to talk about this.”

“No we don’t,” Nathan said. He stammered his way through the next sentence, his head rotating slowly and painfully towards Charles. “We just have to, you know, get rid of ‘em, right?”

“No!” Toki said, slamming the heels of his hands down on the table so hard that the table shook. Charles sighed. He had predicted this. “I wills _not_ lets you takes my babies!”

Pickles nodded his head in tiny movements. Skwisgaar opened his mouth like he wanted to say something but instead let his jaw hang unhinged. Nathan’s forehead became acquainted with the tabletop.

“Boys,” Charles said. He folded his hands over each other. “The doctors don’t know if it is, uh, medically sound to remove the fetuses. We can give them up for adoption—”

“Fucks dat!” Toki said. “Dis ams _my_ babies, and I wills cares for it!”

“Toki, calm down,” Charles said. “We don’t have to make any decisions now. There, is that better? We can, ah, wait, until their birth.”

Toki continued to glare at Charles but did not protest this compromise. Charles considered it a victory. Feeling there was nothing more he could do he left the room, instructed a team of Klokateers to keep an eye on the fathers-to-be, and went to find Murderface. He stumbled upon Murderface and Dick Knubbler in an empty recording studio, attracted by the sound of Murderface’s despair.

“My bandmatesch are fagsch!” Murderface was wailing into the front of Knubbler’s suit, literal tears collecting in his eyes. “Big, huge, gay _pregnant_ fagsch. I’m having a hard time juscht thinking about all the conschequences.”

“There, there,” Knubbler said. He raised a hesitant hand and began to stroke Murderface’s back.

This was going to be a very long six months, Charles thought, as he immediately removed himself from the recording studio. At least Knubbler appeared to have a handle on Murderface.

* * *

“Nathan,” Pickles said, folding his legs beneath him on the ground beside the hot tub. He wasn’t allowed to be in it anymore and it saddened him, the reminder sitting between the hem of his shirt and a stolen pair of Nathan’s boxers. He’d stopped wearing pants in the last week, feeling they were generally too uncomfortable, as well as shoes, and padded around Mordhaus petulant and in a state of undress. “It’s been a month, dude. You have to talk to me sometime. I’m carrying your child.”

Nathan didn’t say anything, but his hands stilled on the laptop he’d been typing on. It was early morning, Skwisgaar and Toki probably holed up in Skwisgaar’s room, where they seemed to exist for a majority of the time now. Pickles had become nocturnal, restless due to the forced pregnancy-related rehab and the pregnancy itself. The baby seemed to take after Nathan in size, Pickles’s baby bump larger than usual and uncomfortable.

“Please,” Pickles said. He crossed an ankle over his knee. He felt a popping sensation in his midsection, recognizing it as the baby kicking. He smiled in the general direction of his stomach. “Look, she’s kickin’. You can feel if you want.”

Nathan looked up. He had done plenty of looking at Pickles, just not enough speaking, and so Pickles didn’t consider this a development. Time passed; the baby quieted again. Pickles thought about names. He liked floral names, like Lily or Magnolia, but thought Nathan wouldn’t approve because of his mother. He wanted Nathan to be involved, he really did.

“Well,” Pickles said. He stood up. “Good talkin’ to you.” He didn’t bother masking the malice in his voice.

He wanted Nathan to come after him, to hold him and tell him how happy he was that they were expecting, but Nathan did not do that. He sighed as he walked off in the direction of Mordhaus, a craving for a smoothie infiltrating his senses. He was going to gain so much weight during this pregnancy with these rampant craving from Nathan’s huge daughter and the lack of booze and drugs to quell them.

In the kitchen he was surprised to see Toki sitting at the table, his legs propped up. Like Pickles Toki was barefoot; unlike Pickles he was shirtless, his belly draping over the hem of his pajama bottoms. His hair was done in two messy side braids, a disarrayed version of the style Pickles had last seen on Toki three days ago. Pickles instructed a Klokateer to make him a pumpkin spice smoothie and took a seat at the table beside Toki.

“Roughs night?” Toki asked Pickles. He sounded tired himself, dark circles under his eyes.

 “Yeah,” Pickles said. “Sure. That’s it.” He propped his elbow on the table, put his head in his hand. “I don’t get it, you know. You and Skwisgaar seem to hate each other, and I totally would’ve thought he was the type of guy to just ditch a girl—I mean, his partner, I guess? Fuck it, I don’t know—when he knocked her up, but nope, you two are inseparable. Meanwhile, Nathan’s not even talkin’ to me.”

Toki shrugged. “Me and Skwisgaar don’t hates each others,” he said. His hands gravitated towards his stomach. “We loves each other very much.”

“Yuck, dude,” Pickles said. A Klokateer handed him his smoothie; he took a sip. “Maybe it’s ‘cause the sex thing was, you know, new, for me and Nathan.” He slurped down the remainder of his smoothie in a fluid motion, feeling a deeper hunger than he ever had in his life.

“Maybes,” Toki said. He flagged down a Klokateer and requested what Pickles was having. “Me and Skwisgaar has been fuckins for years.”

Pickles groaned. “This pregnancy thing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, you know,” he said. “I ain’t even glowin’.”

* * *

Skwisgaar had been a father for a long time. He was a father to many, an absolute army of half-hims running around the earth. Charles handled it, supplying the mothers with the standard support, insuring that they signed waivers. Skwisgaar didn’t have to face the reality of his fatherhood and didn’t think about it that often. But here he was, sitting with his six-month-pregnant boyfriend as he laid on a hospital table, belly bump exposed. Skwisgaar hadn’t wanted to come to this appointment but Toki had begged him to, promising him a blowjob and topping rights for a month after the baby was born. With sex a scarcity as Toki grew more and more pregnant, Skwisgaar accepted.

The nurse prepped Toki, rubbing weird jelly over his stomach, as Skwisgaar sat on a chair by the bed and practiced guitar. He wasn’t going to look at the monitor, he really wasn’t. Instead he looked at Toki’s stomach. Though Toki still possessed his musculature, his abs had all but disappeared among the stretched, taut skin of his stomach. His bellybutton, once a small detail, now stuck out as a prominent fixture. Skwisgaar enjoyed many things when it came to sex but he never found himself attracted to pregnant woman—if anything, he was repulsed by them. He forced himself to be repulsed by a pregnant Toki, as well.

“Here we go!” The nurse said, stepping back. She started rubbing the thing—Skwisgaar had no idea what it was called—across the surface of Toki’s skin, presumably transporting the image of a fetus onto the screen that stood beside Toki’s bed. Skwisgaar didn’t know because he wasn’t looking at it, just at Toki’s face while he watched the screen.

Toki was clearly emotional, biting his lip, his eyes watery. Skwisgaar sort of wanted to take Toki’s hand and tell him it was going to be alright and wow, isn’t that neat, there’s a baby inside of you, but he squandered the urge. No, he played the role of surly boyfriend, closing his eyes and relaxing in his chair.

“What a beautiful baby,” the nurse said. “You want to keep the sex a secret, right?” Skwisgaar couldn’t see, but he thought he heard the sound of paper rustling, of Toki nodding. That had been Toki’s decision, as Skwisgaar didn’t give a fuck either way. Skwisgaar flashed back to long nights spent in Skwisgaar’s bed, Toki unable to get comfortable and rambling on about how he wouldn’t abuse his child like his parents had to him, how he would love it unconditionally, even if it was retarded or something. During those nights Skwisgaar had put an arm around Toki, agreed with him, offered consolidation when necessary. They had been together long before this _incident_ but only afterwards did they decide to start using the term _boyfriend_ for each other. It felt trite, considering the circumstances, but gay marriage was still illegal in the majority of the world and also not something Skwisgaar had particular interest in.

“Skwisgaar,” Toki said. He had the _nagging mother_ voice down. “Amsn’t you nots wanting to looks at our babies?”

“Bab _y_ ,” Skwisgaar said. He didn’t open his eyes. “It ams only one baby, rights?”

“Right,” the nurse said. She had an annoying, chirpy voice, full of exclamation marks. “Come on, it’s important for the father to see the baby!”

“The father has alreadies seen de baby,” Skwisgaar groaned.

“The other father, then.” The annoying chirpy quality drained from her voice, replaced by actual annoyance. It was even worse. Skwisgaar was going to develop a headache if she kept speaking.

“Fine. Whatever. Fucks dis.” Skwisgaar’s eyes burst open, hard enough that he was blinded for a second, and focused on the ultrasound monitor.

What he saw was not a revelation. It was a grainy image of a fetus, large round head and large round belly, little round hands held up. It almost seemed to blink in and out as the nurse moved the thing over Toki’s stomach. Skwisgaar hated to say it but he did feel _something_ when he looked at the screen. It was a sort of ownership, a paternalism, a fondness, sort of like what he felt for Toki except with all of the sexual aspects removed. The feeling intensified when his eyes flickered to Toki’s stupid face, establishing eye contact. Toki was crying. Skwisgaar was trying not to.

“Sees,” Toki said. He reached for Skwisgaar’s hand at the same time Skwisgaar leaned forward and reached for his. They met in the middle. “It ams a miracle.” A cheesy, clichéd line. A tentative, shared smile.

* * *

Despite the fact that they had conceived on the same date, Pickles went into labor first. He and Nathan had been relaxing on the couch, watching a movie with Nathan’s arm around Pickles and talking about names—they had decided on Merlot or Cherry depending on whether she had red or black hair—when Pickles had screamed and doubled over in pain. Nathan, scared as shit, bellowed for help and held Pickles close.

Nathan had to wait outside the hospital room while they performed the operation to remove the child from Pickles’s womb. Nathan had this nasty sense of foreboding deep inside of him, certain that everything would go wrong, that he would lose his child and Pickles both. He had taken a long, long time to warm up to the idea of fatherhood but now he was excited, genuinely excited. He had fun with his father; he could _be_ a fun father. He didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity and didn’t want Pickles to, either.

Skwisgaar, Toki and Charles joined him in his wait, Toki falling asleep on Skwisgaar’s shoulder and Charles trying to comfort Nathan and failing. Knubbler and Murderface arrived sometime later, after the doctor had popped out and told Nathan that everything was going fine and it’d be a little while longer, but had to leave within the space of fifteen minutes due to Murderface’s general personality aggravating the room’s already high tensions. Nathan thought that he knew brutality before that day but he was wrong—the four hours waiting outside Pickles’s hospital room reached a level of ruthlessness that was practically sacred, too personal to transport into song lyrics.

Nathan perked up at the sound of a door opening, an exhausted nurse beckoning Nathan in with a tired “The father may come in now.” Nathan’s nerves betrayed him and appeared on his face. Charles patted him on the shoulder as Nathan rose, starting and stopping a sentence. Toki, still asleep on Skwisgaar’s shoulder, jerked and snored, concerning Skwisgaar beyond Nathan’s problems.

Nathan entered the room and found Pickles looking drugged and holding a tiny bundle of blankets through which Nathan could see a shock of red hair, shades lighter than Pickles’s own, closer to an orange than a red. Nathan’s nervous bared teeth transformed into a smile as he walked to Pickles, ignoring whatever the fuck the doctor was telling him.

“Merlot,” Pickles said, looking up at Nathan. His dreads were stuck to his forehead with sweat, his face red and his eyes a sharp, surprisingly lucid contrast.

“Merlot,” Nathan said, nodding. “Can I—touch her?”

“Shit, I don’t know,” Pickles said. “Do it anyway. Merlot, look, it’s your other dad.” He jostled the baby in a loving bump, as if he could spring her to life that way. She did open her eyes and Nathan was disturbed by how dark they were, though he had the general knowledge that babies’ eyes were either blue or black upon birth.

He reached down to stroke or poke her cheek or something and instead received a gentle hold on his finger, Merlot’s tiny hand reaching out to him. Nathan swallowed back something in his throat, a lump that was probably just the blood that he sometimes threw up whenever he expressed emotion.

Pickles stayed in the hospital for a week, elated to be allowed drugs again, growing attached to Merlot. They had given her the middle name of Rose, a tribute to Nathan’s mother and satisfying Pickles’s odd obsession with floral names. Merlot had delicate, pale skin and Nathan swore her eyes grew lighter every day. She alternated her time between crying and sleeping, her voice loud as Nathan’s and shrill as Pickles’s. She weighed ten pounds at birth and measured twenty-two inches, huge for a baby, and Nathan was secretly happy that she seemed to inherit Pickles’s nose. He held her in the rocking chair they had placed in Pickles’s room while Pickles slept, fed her a bottle of one of their hired wet nurse’s milk, cooed to her in the best baby voice he could muster.

Toki eyed her with envy every time he came to visit, holding his swollen stomach. Skwisgaar approached her with caution and refused to hold her, though Merlot seemed to love Skwisgaar, eyes fixed on his face whenever he entered the room. Charles, too, refused to hold her, instead admiring her from a safe distance. Murderface visited and Nathan did not allow him to hold Merlot, which caused Murderface to leave. Knubbler gave Merlot her first baby clothes, something that had escaped the mind of everybody in Dethklok and had sent a team of Klokateers to the best baby stores all over the world. Charles gifted her a custom made morning star rattle.

Pickles’s body returned to the way it had been before birth as far as his organs were concerned; he had gained about fifteen pounds during the pregnancy, his stomach still bloated. He didn’t seem to notice, as he spent all of his time in bed, leaving Nathan alone to take care of Merlot. Merlot was a pinnacle of health, allowed to exit the hospital five days before Pickles. Nathan walked her through the halls of Mordhaus and showed her around, sang to her without his death growl, put her in the elaborate crib they’d had built for her in his room. When Pickles was dismissed they moved to Nathan’s room permanently, sleeping around each other and interrupted by Merlot’s expansive cries at odd hours of the night. It was in this that Nathan found the inspiration for the next Dethklok album, parenthood presenting an unlimited number of heavy and brutal situations.

* * *

It took fifteen days after Pickles going into labor for Toki to. He had been in the kitchen, making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and licking peanut butter off the knife, when he felt an intense pain in his abdomen. He cried out, the knife falling to the floor and his arms wrapping around his midsection. He wanted to puke or pass out or both, sinking to his knees as a Klokateer rushed to his side. They pulled him up and helped him to the hospital, instructing one of his coworkers to alert Skwisgaar on the way.

Like with Pickles Toki was put under drugs and separated from the rest of the band as he underwent the C-section. He forced the Klokateer that had led him to the hospital to remain and hold his hand, pissed off that they wouldn’t less Skwisgaar in, not even wanting to think about what he might be feeling at the moment. The surgeon had learned from experience with Pickles and was able to cut the time of Toki’s surgery in half, unearthing Toki’s baby in a little over two and a half hours. The sound of their voice, a small but powerful scream in the bustling hospital room, would have made Toki sob had his throat not been scratchy from his own screaming and his eyes raw from tears of pain. The only thing he could think was to tell the surgeon that they couldn’t tell him the sex until Skwisgaar was in the room, and speaking of that, why the _fuck_ wasn’t Skwisgaar in the room yet?

They wrapped Toki’s baby and put it in his arms. They had dark hair, darker than Toki’s own, and their eyes were closed, a thin purple membrane. Skwisgaar entered the room, came to Toki’s side.

“You’re holding a little girl,” the surgeon told them, standing at the foot of Toki’s bed.

“Goods,” Toki said, stroking some hair off his daughter’s forehead. “Da tams what I wanteds, secretsly.”

Skwisgaar said nothing. Toki looked up at him and saw that he was crying and smiling, looking all sorts of beautiful in the dim florescent lighting of the room.

“So it ams Valkyrie, den,” Toki said. He alternated between looking at his daughter and at Skwisgaar, gauging their individual reactions. “Or Inger?”

Skwisgaar continued to not respond, his lips tight, tears on his face. He joined Toki in stroking their daughter’s forehead. She was much smaller than Nathan and Pickles’s daughter, only seven pounds and eighteen inches. She kept her eyes closed, her little lips rosy and plush as Skwisgaar’s, her cheekbones already defined. Toki struggled to find something of his in her face, getting the answer when she opened her eyes, the color matching Toki’s.

“She ams so beautiful,” Skwisgaar said at last, in this strange strangled voice Toki had never heard before. “Inger it ams.”

“I ams glads we did nots have to use de ugly babies name,” Toki said, and then he fell asleep.

* * *

Keeping the pregnancies and the resulting children from the public eye was a difficult task, but it wasn’t too daunting considering other things Charles had done for the band. It was not uncommon for Dethklok to slip from the public eye for periods of times given their cantankerous nature and the pregnancy hadn’t kept them from finishing the last album they had been working on, satisfying the population. There was the issue of touring but they would probably be able to put that off for another view months, maybe do some public appearances once Pickles and Toki lost the baby weight to keep their fans at bay. He couldn’t risk letting the girls seep into public knowledge by way of adoption, either. Nathan’s parents were the only ones that expressed interests in being a presence in their granddaughter’s life, arriving every Wednesday and Saturday to see Merlot.

Overall Charles was pleased, though he lived in a state of disbelief at this particular predicament. Nathan and Pickles had asked him to be the godfather to Merlot, a position he’d accepted without comment on the atheism of both of her parents. They had a Catholic baptism in a vain attempt to please Pickles’s mother when the child was a month old. Skwisgaar and Toki stuck to their nihilistic beliefs and intended to raise their daughter with no religion, though Toki had made the curious request to have Klokateer #586 be Inger’s godfather. Their parenting skills were about what Charles had expected them to be: Skwisgaar hadn’t the slightest idea of what to do around a child and needed constant help while Toki was possessive and protective and Nathan and Pickles were competent but reluctant. He hired a new round of Klokateers, mostly female, some wet nurses and some babysitters, all bound to an oath of secrecy, for the care and upkeep of Merlot Explosion and Inger Skwigelf.

He sat at the head of another meeting, this time with the band in full and their children, Merlot sitting on Nathan’s lap and supported by an arm around the child’s chest, Toki holding Inger in his arms. They were three months old now, Merlot closer to four, and admittedly quite cute. Merlot had thin, sparse red hair, her eyes lightening to a greenish color, while Inger’s hair had lightened into her father’s blonde, her eyes still blue. Merlot was a crier; Inger was demure. Charles had to admit that he felt a fondness for them, though he had no particular inclinations towards having children himself.

“So, ah,” Charles began, nodding at the two sets of parents sitting opposite each other at the table, “how are things with your, ah, children?”

“They’re good,” Nathan said. He looked down at his daughter’s head. “Isn’t she cute? She’s, like, the most metal baby in the history of the fuckin’ world.” Pickles nodded in agreement and raised a beer.

“She is quite cute,” Charles said. He turned towards Skwisgaar and Toki. “And your status report?” he asked them, propping an eyebrow. Skwisgaar was in the process of scooping Inger from Toki’s arms.

“Ja, Inger ams good, too,” Skwisgaar said. He examined Inger, toying with the fabric flower on the headband that Toki had put on her.  “Ams a real cock block, doe.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” Pickles said, and he drank to it.

“I wants another,” Toki announced, his hands slamming on the table. Charles fought the urge to pinch his nose, reminded of Toki’s behavior in that first meeting.

“Maybe you should wait and see how much you like this one first,” Nathan said.

Murderface, who had been sitting near Charles with his arms crossed over his chest, lurched forward. “Goddammit, I want a baby! How did they conshceive them? Tell me!” He leaned over and took the front of Charles’s suit and shook. Charles sighed. Knubbler had failed him.

“From what I’ve discovered,” Charles said, removing Murderface’s hand form his suit and smoothing out the material, “Seth had, ah, poisoned some of Pickles’s alcohol with a magical potion, resulting in the pregnancy. Toki had drank from Pickles’s supply that night. Presumably, they had sex with Nathan and Skwisgaar afterwards and had fallen pregnant.”

“Well, get me schome of that schit,” Murderface said, refolding his arms over his chest. “I’m not gonna be the only one in this schtupid band without a baby.”

“You’d have to have somebody to have sex with, though,” Nathan said. He covered his daughter’s ear as he said this.

“Oh, you think I can’t get laid? I’ll have you know, I’m fucking Knubbler!” Murderface spat this in Nathan’s direction, spit flying into Pickles’s face.

“William,” Charles said, as gentle as he could despite his growing irritation, “babies are not a fashion accessory. They are a permanent thing. They are, ah, _human beings_. I would like for you to…consider this further.”

“Oh, I’ll conschider it alright,” Murderface said, furrowing his eyebrows. He said it like a threat, which made no sense, but Charles had stopped trying to make sense of Murderface’s actions years ago.

“Now that that’s out of the way, it’s time to get onto the business—“Charles began saying, but by the time he made his way to the end of his sentence the band had left, babies (or lack thereof) in tow. He wrote a note to himself to talk to Knubbler about what was going on with William, put his phone back in his pocket, and left the dining room. He needed a drink.

* * *

“Gentlemen, it appears that Dethklok has decided to tackle the subject of parenthood,” Stampington began. Behind him the images of Merlot and Inger appeared on the screen, dressed in diapers and black t-shirts and sitting side-by-side, Inger with a single pink bow in her hair. “They have decided to keep their children. It was difficult to extract this information, but with the aid of one of our soldiers, we have succeeded.”

“Well,” Crozier said. He had his eyes closed and his head in his hands. “Tell us about it.”

“Skwisgaar Skwigelf and Toki Wartooth produced Inger Wartooth Skwigelf while Nathan Explosion and Pickles the Drummer produced Merlot Rose Explosion. William Murderface has expressed desire to have a child with Dick Knubbler.”

“You’re kidding me.” Crozier’s voice was flat.

“This is a serious matter, General Crozier,” Salacia admonished. “I would appreciate your full participation.”

“Indeed,” Orlaag said. There was a pause as the Tribunal waited him for him to comment further, but he did not.

Stampington cleared his throat. “Here to tell us more is homosexual celebrity parenting expert Dr. Horfordskilstin.”


	18. sense safety and sound

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Skwisgaar/Toki. Cuddling makes the pain go away. Written before Doomstar.

Skwisgaar hasn’t seen that much of Toki since he was returned. It isn’t out of Skwisgaar’s own volition—Toki is shuffled between doctors and psychiatrists, trying to repair his broken body and psyche, and he spends more time than not in the hospital, visitors not allowed. Skwisgaar passes the days doing the thing he knew best: practicing guitar. He hasn’t been interested in sex for months, not since Toki had been taken away, hasn’t even so much as gotten an erection. The return to a sort of normalcy, past the deaths of so many including those who opposed them and poor Abigail, is unsettling. Skwisgaar spends far too much time by himself.

But, when Toki is free of doctors and psychiatrists and not drugged out of his mind or living in the past, he and Skwisgaar stick together. Toki practices guitar, now, as some sort of comfort, and Skwisgaar never would’ve thought that he’d see the day where this made him sad, but it does. They’re always touching, whether it be a thigh pressed into a thigh or a hand layered over a hand, and the band doesn’t say anything because fuck the band, this is serious. They don’t talk, not a lot. They spend their time together in understanding silence, infiltrated only by the sound of their harmonies, softer, sweeter and sadder than before.

Even rarer are the nights that Toki doesn’t spend in a hospital bed. Those are Skwisgaar’s favorite nights, though, because Toki can’t sleep alone and Skwisgaar’s the first one to volunteer to let Toki sleep in his room. Toki slips under the blanket, into Skwisgaar’s arm. It’s not sexual; Skwisgaar doesn’t know if it ever will be, if either he or Toki will ever be capable of sexual feeling again. But it’s pleasant, it’s comforting, it’s warm, it’s everything they need, skin to skin, hair tangling in hair, body to body. Nose to nose, sometimes, stomach to back others, always entangled, always close. Always together.


	19. let me hold both your hands in the holes of my sweater

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> head's in the clouds but my gravity's centered. Skwisgaar/Toki, High School AU.

It starts with a sweater. Toki shows up to school in shorts and short sleeves on the coldest day of the fucking year, his nose red and face construed in a grimace, and Skwisgaar can’t help but take Toki away when he walks up to the group they hang out with by the lockers before school. He stows him away in the handicapped stall of the bathroom and asks him why he isn’t dressed warmly; Toki shivers and says that it’s no big deal, the lack of answer giving Skwisgaar one anyway. He takes Toki’s hands and sticks them into his own sweater, a very chic patterned thing, and Toki smiles up with these stupid eyes at Skwisgaar and Skwisgaar can’t help but kiss him. The smell of a boys’ bathroom, yellowish lighting and cold radiating form soiled tile doesn’t make for much of a romantic first kiss but Skwisgaar does it anyway, bending his neck as Toki stands on his tippy toes, bridging the height gap between them. Hands get lost in hair. Skwisgaar shrugs the leather jacket he’s wearing off and wraps it around Toki’s shoulder—Skwisgaar wears his clothes baggy and it fits Toki perfectly—and Toki smiles up at him, looking stupid and kissable with thick lips, and Skwisgaar steals another before slipping away ten minutes after the bell rings. He tells Toki not to tell anyone, talking in Swedish just in case, his boots making loud sounds in the empty bathroom as he sashays away.

But of course Skwisgaar forgets that Toki’s wearing his jacket and by the time he’s switched to second period he has girls on him, asking him about this. Even Lavona, often more interested in Nathan and thus an object of Skwisgaar’s affection, hangs form his arms, asks him what’s up with that freshie in his leather jacket. Skwisgaar swats her away, uninterested in her and her tight cleavage-revealing metal girl gear. “Fucks off,” he says, and it does nothing but make her swoon for him, that accent, that long blond hair, that patterned sweater and ripped white jeans. Skwisgaar’s too sexy for his own good, that’s the problem, and the boy he wants is on his mind through French and English and Math. He thinks about the way Toki tastes, like toothpaste and sugar, wishes he could text him and take him out of his class to make out some more. But Toki’s a good kid and gets good grades and loves school and also doesn’t have a phone so Skwisgaar is stuck sucking on the end of a pencil, scowling as the rumors about him fucking the new kid grows. (He tells them that he would never stoop so low; in reality, he doesn’t want to stoop so low _for_ Toki, doesn’t want to spoil this, not yet.)

By the time they regroup for break, convening with the rest of the guys around a picnic table in the courtyard with Pickles sitting on top and Nathan’s arm brazen around Pickles’s shoulders, Murderface in some heated discussion with Knubbler, Toki standing with his hands shoved in the pockets of his shorts and Skwisgaar’s jacket around his arms staring at his shoes, Skwisgaar running his hand through his hair and sighing a lot, the whole school’s shooting him looks. He wants to flip them off and say fuck them all because Toki’s too good for this, he’s an innocent little freshman with this mysterious trouble past and he’s driving Skwisgaar absolutely mad. Skwisgaar wraps a hand around Toki’s shoulder bone, steals him away for the second time today, this time into the corner of an untraveled hallway.

“Dey’s talkin’ bout us,” Toki whispers, eyes on Skwisgaar’s lips and hands folded behind his back. Skwisgaar has a foot propped up on its toe, a hand by Toki’s head, their faces but inches apart.

“Ja,” Skwisgaar says, annoyed. “Dey sucks. You’s great.”

“I know.” Toki grins. Skwisgaar laughs; they all think Toki’s this pure little Christian boy but Skwisgaar knows, knows the streak and the rage that lies underneath, beneath that skin. Skwisgaar wraps his free hand around Toki’s wrist, feels his pulse. He wants to say something romantic but can’t even think of anything in Swedish so he takes Toki’s hand and holds it against Toki’s chest as he leans in and kisses him in these slow, languid laps, he’s been thinking about this all _day_.

And then after school, Skwisgaar driving Toki home in his shitty beat-up car that he worked two summers for and could barely drive anyway and everybody thinks they’re dating so Skwisgaar guesses they’re dating. “Keeps de jackets,” he says, idling outside of Toki’s house with his engine growling. Toki’s face lights up and it makes it worth it, it makes the whole thing worth it.

That weekend they go down to the beach and they stand with their bare feet in the freezing water and Toki’s wearing that leather jacket and his hair is whipping around his face and he needs to shave but Skwisgaar doesn’t have the heart to tell him that because he’s so in love with the fine hairs on Toki’s face from his eyelashes to the pubescent boy stubble. They’re holding hands and it’s overcast as fuck, everything tinged gray and blue, fog surrounding them so that they’re in their own nautical cocoon. Skwisgaar can’t see the edges of the world on either side as they blur into white fuzz, can’t see twenty feet in only direction, can only see white sand and blue-green water and Toki’s skin. Condensation builds up from the fog, coating their faces and getting in their eyes and their hair and sand is on Toki’s lips from the wind and they connect their mouths in this sloppy kiss, their toes edging towards each other in this freezing water, the tide moving in and out makes them feel like they’re moving when they’re standing still. And Skwisgaar thinks, fuck it, fuck them, fuck it all, this is all he needs, this lovely boy and this shitty weather, fuck his mother and fuck his other friends, fuck them all. He runs a hand down Toki’s face, drabbing a drop of moisture with his thumb, then across Toki’s lips. “You’s mine,” Skwisgaar whispers, over and over again until his words fade into nothing but touches of lips on Toki’s skin that keeps him shivering.


	20. Tuesday Afternoon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Charles/Pickles. Tumblr Request: daddykink smut.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i edited this pretty heavily because it was originally terrible lol

Charles was sitting in his office, doing paperwork, anticipating a call from a company about an endorsement deal. A completely average Tuesday, he was expecting disaster any minute, torn between feeling antsy and feeling appreciative towards the quiet. He had just signed his name at the bottom of one paper and was moving towards the next when there was a knock at the door.

“Come in,” Charles said, expecting his secretary and not looking up from his paperwork. There was a pause, and when he lifted his head he saw instead a distressed Pickles, holding the hem of his shirt in his hands and biting his lip. This was something else Charles had come to expect, but it was much preferable to chaos or his secretary. “Oh, it’s you, Pickles. Close the door.”

Pickles did that while Charles shuffled the paperwork to the corner of his desk, putting his pen neatly on top of the stack.

“What is it that you want, Pickles?” He asked, relaxing in his chair. His fingers curled in to his palms, not quite making a fist, on top of the desk.

“Well, um, uh—” Pickles started, growing red and stammering through the beginning of the sentence until he spit it out in one breath. “Seth was on Dethklok minute and all the other guys were dicks about it and I’m sort of upset I guess.”

“Oh,” Charles said. He sighed. “Come here, Pickles.” Pickles came closer to him, around the desk, and Charles wrapped his arms around Pickles, bringing him into his lap. Pickles sniffled, hiding his face in his hands. “Shh,” Charles said, running a hand over Pickles’s head. “I can make it all better.” He dropped his voice, running his hand down Pickles’s side until he found Pickles’s hand, bought it to the growing bulge in Charles’s pants. Charles spoke the next sentence with trepidation lining his voice, always afraid that Pickles would jump off his lap and call him weird for participating in this, or that he might do the same to Pickles. “Don’t you want Daddy to make it all better?”

Pickles nodded, nuzzling his face up against Charles and kneading him through his suit pants. Pickles’s eyes were closed and Charles thought about smiling before deciding against it. He unbuttoned his pants and led Pickles’s hand inside of them, watching as a similar lump began to form in Pickles’s pants. He wasn’t about to do anything with that, instead using one hand to rub Pickles’s back, the other to guide Pickles’s fingers towards his cock, wrapping them around it himself, before entangling that hand in Pickles’s hair. After a few minutes of Pickles stroking and whining Charles tugged on his head and used the hand that had been rubbing Pickles’s back to push his desk chair back, Pickles falling to his knees in front of Charles’s chair and Charles spreading his legs wide. Pickles’s mouth was warm, shaped to the exaggerated vowels of his accent, watering for Charles’s dick.

“Don’t you feel better now? Is sucking Daddy's dick making all of his baby boy's pain go away?” Charles cooed, adopting a bit of a condescending tone and curling his fingers around Pickles’s dreads. He yanked on them as Pickles nodded, thrust his cock into the back of Pickles’s throat. Pickles yelped in a mix of surprise and pleasure, his eyes closed tight. It was a sight, it really was, every feature of Pickles’s face drawn up with need, spit all over his fucking face, Charles's cock buried to the base in Pickles's mouth. Charles stroked a thumb down his cheek, felt his own dick through Pickles’s skin. He wasted no time in thrusting, always a fan of efficiency. “I’m not going to come in your mouth, you filthy little boy,” Charles said, and he pushed Pickles’s face away. “Stand up. Bend over.”

“Yes, Daddy,” Pickles said, his voice wrecked. He went to pull his pants down and Charles stopped him, slapping him on the ass to hurry up the process. Pickles turned around and bent over the desk, forming a neat ninety degree angle. Charles tugged his pants and boxers down just enough to expose him and his perfect, pert ass; Charles placed his hands on it and spread it, just to admire for a few seconds, before pulling open a drawer for lube. He unscrewed the bottle and coated himself before returning his hands to Pickles’s ass, opening him, jamming inside of him. Pickles moaned this time, his face dropping to the desk. "So good," he whimpered. "So big. Daddy, you have the best cock."

"That's right." Charles bent over him, connecting his chest to Pickles’s back, and once more curled his hands in Pickles’s hair, pulling his head up as far as it would go. Charles put his mouth to Pickles’s neck and sucked, scraped his teeth against Pickles’s skin. Maybe one day he would ask to bite him, to draw blood, but today he just held his neck back and thrust into him hard enough to make Pickles scream a mixture of his name and Pickles’s name for him, _Daddy_ , and Pickles hurried to get a hand on his own cock, jerking himself with his thighs trembling underneath Charles, coming all over the underside of Charles’s desk. Charles would have somebody else clean that up later but Pickles jerked him away from that thought with a final exclamation, screaming _fuck me, Ch—Daddy_ , and Charles came, his composure slipping for a second when he panted against Pickles’s neck.

He took his hands away from Pickle’s hair, Pickles’s head dropping to his desk. He slid out from Pickles and pulled his pants up for him, over the sopping mess that Charles had left behind. Pickles turned around and looked at Charles with this heartbreaking expression and Charles though oh, maybe today was one of those days where Pickles needed three hours of comforting and cuddling, but then Pickles was gone, slipping out of Charles’s office. Probably for the best, Charles thought, calling his secretary to get a clean-up crew in his office. He has work to do.


	21. Back and Better than Ever

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Immediate written response to Doomstar. Skwisgaar/Toki.

He grabs him by the wrist and he gets him the fuck out of there. It’s the only thing he can think of, the only one on his mind–Abigail’s thrust into his arms but he passes her off as soon as he can, making his way for Toki. He snatches Toki from Nathan when Nathan lets him go and he lets Toki stand on his own because he knows that sometimes Toki needs that, but when the place is about to blow his hand is on his wrist and they’re getting the fuck out of there.

And he’s happy, for some reason, despite the fact that he has no idea what’s going on because he feels a pulse underneath his fingers and he’s aware that whatever godly shit they did restored Toki, and Toki’s back, and Toki's  _back_ , he can feel him between his fingers. He had to admit he was faking it a little when he was with the other guys, this not missing him part, because it's  _Toki,_ it’s his vaguely incestuous  _brother_ , and as soon as they’re safe their mouths are on each other. No words, though they’re using the same muscles and the same mechanics, talking into each other’s souls by way of physical contact. An old game and something Skwisgaar wouldn’t trade for the fucking  _world_. 


	22. This City is for Strangers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Preklok preslash Skwisgaar/Toki Halloween fic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> as i do with fics i didn't originally title, i stole this one's from the song i was listening to: gray or blue by jaymay.

They were living in a three-bedroom apartment, Skwisgaar and Toki sharing a room, Nathan and Pickles each having one of their own and Murderface crashing on the couch most nights though he lived elsewhere. It just so happened that they lived conveniently close to the trick-or-treating hotspot of their city; it just so happened that there was enough lying around to scrape up a costume for Toki; it just so happened that Skwisgaar was free that night of Halloween. Toki had been dropping these pitiful hints that he wanted to do this very American, very childish thing, and Skwisgaar had been picking up on them but not indicating which way he leaned. The other guys were opaque—they were too old, too cool, for this baby holiday, and they were going to stay in and watch snuff films all night.

 “Wells,” Skwisgaar said, crossing his arms and leaning against the wall. He was addressing Nathan, Pickles and Murderface, who were crammed together on that ugly green couch they’d bought at a secondhand store last week, staring at the much nicer television they had splurged on as soon as they bought the apartment. “We’lls bes back in a bit.”

“I can’t believe you’re doing this, Skwisgaar,” Pickles said. He had a bowl of popcorn on his lap and a bottle of Jack in his hands.

Skwisgaar shrugged. “Good chance to sees goils in dere slutty costumes, ja? Mights get laids.”

“Aren’t they mostly teenagers? Isn’t that illegal for you now?”

“Does it matters?” The guys exchanged glances and shakes of the head, in agreement that no, it did not. Skwisgaar looked over his shoulder, into the hallway, and elevated his voice. “Tokis! Hurries up.”

“Holds on!” came Toki’s voice, which had deepened a little in the last few months. A few seconds later he emerged from his and Skwisgaar’s shared room. He was dressed as a skeleton, wearing a tight long-sleeved black shirt with an intricate depiction of bones that he had painted himself and matching pants, his face whitened and bone structure strengthened with makeup. He carried a pillowcase that he had knotted at the top around his hand and a smile, walking to Skwisgaar’s side.

The other guys propped their eyebrows; Toki’s costume was actually pretty decent. Skwisgaar put a hand on Toki’s shoulder, not quite sure why he did it but finding it necessary, and opened his mouth to speak and get on with the day when Toki cut him off.

“Gots you somethin’,” Toki said. He produced a cheap pair of angel wings and gave them to Skwisgaar. “Wears dem for me? You’s already all in white.”

Skwisgaar didn’t say anything, just made a face of disgust and took his hand off of Toki’s shoulder, heading for the door. Toki followed him. Skwisgaar couldn’t see his face, but he imagined that he was unhappy. When they were out of the apartment and in the hallway, safe from the eyes of the other guys, Skwisgaar slid his arms into the angel wings and flexed. He probably looked ridiculous, but whatever, it was worth it to see Toki’s eyes light up like that.

“Has you ever gone trick-or-treating before, Skwisgaar?” Toki asked as they walked down the hallway and towards the elevator.

Skwisgaar shook his head. “Nevers wanted to. Amsn’t a thing in Sweden. Dey do it in Norway, doe, right?” Skwisgaar had a friend in his youth that had lived in Norway for a couple of years, thus giving him this knowledge.

Toki nodded. “Mines parents,” he said, trailing off and looking towards the side. Skwisgaar put a hand on the small of Toki’s back and wanted to say something. He had no confirmation of it but through the months that Toki had been in the band he’d been growing suspicious of Toki’s home life. He knew his parents were alive, but he didn’t know what sort of parents kicked their seventeen-year-old out of the house, much less the _country_ , and let them live homeless. Skwisgaar would argue that he had been mildly neglected as a child, but he had the suspicion that whatever Toki’s parents had done were far worse. Sharing a room with Toki he had seen the scars that his hand now hovered over.

The elevator opened in front of them and they shuffled into the cramped space. The elevator in their building had a particular smell, not pleasant or malodorous in nature but strange, and they crinkled their noses out of instinct and laughed at themselves. Skwisgaar had been mature for his age for as long as he could remember, too involved in perfecting his guitar skill to ever indulge in the teenager experience, but Toki bought something childish out in him. He appreciated it.

They rode the elevator to the lobby and went out of the building, walking deeper into the neighborhood. The sun was down but it wasn’t quite dark yet, everything tinged a navy blue and cars driving with their lights off. The streets were already heavy with people and Skwisgaar expected them to become stuffed by the end of the night. They passed groups of children of all ages, from those that could barely walk to those similar to Toki and Skwisgaar’s ages, and Toki was bouncing and babbling about how excited and happy he was. Skwisgaar was silent, walking with his hands in his pockets and surveying the girls in their revealing cat or undead cheerleader costumes, occasionally smiling at something Toki would say.

He stood at the end of driveways while Toki collected candy and talked aimlessly with some of the girls. They flirted heavily, twirling their hair and batting their eyelashes, offering their numbers, but he found he wasn’t too interested in picking one of them up. He would tell them that he was in a band, that he was with his brother (because it was easier to explain it that way), that his accent was Swedish, and they would eat it up, but he just wasn’t in the mood. Then Toki would return and he would walk off from the conversation with the girls, not even bothering with a goodbye.

They went up and down the streets until Toki was carrying a heavy, lumpy pillowcase, some houses in the ritzier part even giving out full candy bars. Skwisgaar was not looking forward to rooming with someone on a permanent sugar high but he was happy to see Toki happy. They ended up all the way to the edge of their town, to the seafront, and they walked all the way down the pier that extended towards the ocean, taking a seat on the stone benches at the end. It was  _cold_ down by the water but they had both been desensitized to such temperatures a long time ago. Nevertheless Skwisgaar slung an arm over Toki’s shoulder, brought him close as they went through the bag of candy, Skwisgaar remembering to check that none of them had been rewrapped or otherwise tampered with.

"Thank so much for this, Skwisgaar,” Toki said, looking up at him. His nose was red from the cold, his hair whipping around his face from the wind. There was, fittingly, a full moon, and the choppy black water hitting the sides of the pier was sufficient ominous. Skwisgaar pulled Toki as far as he could towards him, wrapped his other arm around him, spoke into his hair.

“You’s welcome,” Skwisgaar said, and he kissed the top of Toki’s head, not sure what the fuck he meant by it.

“You’s my favorites, you know,” Toki said, so quietly that Skwisgaar didn’t know if he was meant to hear it or not, so he didn’t respond, only pulled back from Toki and grabbed a chocolate bar from Toki’s pillowcase. He unwrapped it and took a large bite, making Toki push him and causing a chain reaction of play-fighting and laughing, everything Skwisgaar could ever want out of Halloween.


	23. Grocery Shopping Hijinks

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Skwisgaar/Toki preklok preslash. Tumblr Request: Skwisgaar and Toki grocery shopping hijinks.

Dethklok forced the two members of the band that didn’t speak English all that well and had more exotic palettes to go grocery shopping solely because everybody else was busy. The hierarchy went that Charles would go first and foremost, buying both everybody’s favorites and enough healthy food to keep them from gaining weight or dying prematurely of high cholesterol and hypertension, then Pickles, who was generally the most responsible and the band didn’t exactly complain when he bought home an equal amount of booze as food, then Murderface who was at least a food enthusiast, then Nathan, and then Skwisgaar and Toki. But Charles was in a meeting with a record label, Pickles was in Wisconsin on family vacation, Murderface was in the hospital getting his appendix removed and Nathan was suffering from a horrible cold, so Skwisgaar and Toki took a bus to the grocery store, both pissed off at this fact, their faces screwed up in scowls.

“Dis ams _racist_ ,” Skwisgaar declared as they crossed the threshold into the grocery store, his arms folded over his chest and eyes set straight ahead on the aisles upon aisles of food that he couldn’t read that well.

Toki nodded. “Fuckin’ racists,” he said. “Dey thinks dey can push us arounds just ‘cause we’s different from them.” He flicked some of his hair, which was in an awkward stage that hung just a few inches below his shoulder, out of his face. He’d ditched the gnome hat recently and had started growing a beard, leaving him in a transitory stage that made Skwisgaar’s heart hurt if he caught him in the right angle sometimes. They got a grocery cart, Skwisgaar pushing it and Toki hovering at Skwisgaar’s side, and headed into an aisle.

It wasn’t a wise decision to enter the aisle containing candy and other such snacks first but they had gone straight ahead and there they were, flanked by all the unhealthy junk Toki could ever want. Skwisgaar sighed and tapped his foot as Toki shoveled bags upon bags of junk into the grocery cart. Skwisgaar couldn’t stop him, not while seeing his goddamned happy face and having the knowledge of what had gone down with his parents recently bestowed upon him, and he was more fighting the urge to hold Toki’s hand more than slap him across the face. He berated himself for such thoughts, disgusted and dismayed at his own brain, and was retrieved from his thoughts only by the image of Toki snapping his fingers in front of his face.

“Skwisgaars?” Toki said, snapping again.

Skwisgaar put his hand on Toki’s wrist. “Stops dat.”

“I’s just sayin’s it’s time to gets movin’,” Toki said. “I gots lots of snacks but now we needs de vegetativetables and fruits. Maybes some leans meats and whole grains too, yeah?” He leaned against the cart, half-filled with lumpy bags of candies, and kept going on and on about shit that sounded awfully healthy.

“We’s gots plenties of _lean meats_ ,” Skwisgaar said, but the joke was lost on Toki, who was now babbling on about B vitamins. Skwisgaar wondered where he’d learned all of that and figured that it probably had something to do with Toki’s musculature as he began to push the cart down the aisle.

The next one over, concerning hygiene products and household supplies, bored them. The one after that had ethnic foods with labels they couldn’t even begin to read. Another aisle onward contained spices and coffee and Skwisgaar told Toki to _watches dis_ as he jumped onto the cart and propelled himself forward, gliding down the aisle and skidding himself to a stop in front of bags of coffee beans.

“Oh, lets me try!” Toki said. He swatted at Skwisgaar’s hand on the cart and Skwisgaar stepped aside to examine coffee labels. Toki jumped on the cart and turned it around, rocketing in the opposite direction that Skwisgaar had gone and shouting _wowee_ all the while. Skwisgaar ignored Toki but smiled to himself, selecting a textured and cerulean-colored bag from the shelf.

Skwisgaar whistled to slow Toki down but did not whistle in time as Toki went crashing into a rack of canned soups that had been on the opposite side of the aisle. Skwisgaar blanched as soup cans rained down, a few from the top shelf busting against linoleum and spreading a thick liquid similar in coloration to blood. He heard a high-pitched whine that probably belonged to an injured Toki, finally putting him in motion as he walked (albeit at a brisk pace) to the crash site. By then Toki had attracted visitors, employees shouting, shoppers laughing. Toki had been knocked on his ass and was surrounded by rolling cans oozing soup.

Skwisgaar helped him up, torn between scowling, yelling and laughing himself. Toki rubbed his head and complained in Norwegian that he’d been hit there.

“You’re going to have to pay for those, boys,” some plump middle-aged lady said to the side, her arms crossed over her chest. From the nametag resting on her ample bosom Skwisgaar deduced her to be the manager. He raised his eyebrows as he calculated how much he might be able to get for free out of the woman, than affixed his face into something more charming, putting a hand on the woman’s shoulder and leading her away.

By the time he emerged from the lady’s office, their debt taken care of and a promise that they can get their food for free there anytime they wanted, Skwisgaar was in a much better mood. He found Toki in the frozen food section, tossing bags of mixed vegetables into the cart. A quick survey of the cart yielded the fact that Toki had done a surprisingly good job.

“Has fun?” Toki asked, looking up at Skwisgaar as he started to move the cart from the aisle, towards the check-out.

Skwisgaar shrugged. “You?”

Toki shook his head. “Mines head hurts,” Toki said, lifting both of his hands to the spot on his temple he’d been rubbing earlier. Skwisgaar took the opportunity to take the cart from Toki and start pushing it himself.

“Does you wants me to kisses it and makes it better?” Skwisgaar asked. He said it mockingly, but Toki nodded, his face screwed up in pain. Skwisgarr looked around and, seeing nobody, leaned over to press his lips against Toki’s temple as quickly as he could.

“Alls better,” Toki chirped.

Skwisgaar didn’t say anything, only pushed the cart into a check-out line and walked around to start unloading the items onto the conveyor belt.


	24. The Start of Something Good

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr Request: Nathan and Pickles meeting for the first time. Genfic. Warning for homophobic language.

“Yeah, scho I have thisch friend that I’ve known schince high school,” Murderface was saying, draped across Nathan’s couch and filing his nails. “He juscht moved down here becausche the muschic schene is scho great and he broke up with hisch old band. Snakes ‘n’ Barrelsch, have you heard of them?”

Nathan, sitting in his desk chair and smoking a joint while waiting for the high to settle in, shook his head. “Sounds faggy,” he said.

Murderface shook his head almost as if on reflex, then started nodding instead. “Okay, maybe it kind of wasch,” he said. “It doeschn’t matter now, though, becausche thisch guy isch like a musical geniusch, and I think he could play drumsch for Dethklok. Schince we already have Magnusch on guitar and we haven’t decided if we want another one.”

This piqued Nathan’s interest. “Are you sure this guy will be good enough?” he asked, lowering the joint down. “We need, like, a really heaver drummer, not some faggy Bowie guy.”

“Truscht me, he’sch nothing like Bowie,” Murderface said. He threw the nail file down on the floor and sat up. “ _Anyway_ , where I wasch getting isch that he’sch having a house warming party tonight and I’m invited. Let’sch go, you can meet him there.” He got up off the couch and stretched.

“Yeah, okay,” Nathan said. He rose from the chair and grabbed the leather jacket that had been relaxing on it. He hadn’t gotten anywhere as high as he’d intended to that night, but this was probably a better course of events in the long run. He threw the jacket on and grabbed his keys, walking out of his apartment.

The guy—he learned from Murderface on the way that he was called Pickles—didn’t live too far from Nathan, actually, just a few roads and minutes over. He had a proper house, not an apartment like Nathan, sitting on the southern side of town with a shitty lawn. All the lights were on, pouring into the black of night, cars lined up and down the street. Nathan parked his truck in the neighbor’s driveway, not giving a fuck, and put the keys in his jacket pocket, walking with Murderface across the way.

The door was open and they let themselves in. Nathan recognized a few faces from the local metal scene, including a girl he had been in a sort-of relationship with and had never properly dumped. She detached herself from her group of friends and started to walk towards Nathan; Nathan hurried to walk with Murderface instead of hovering behind him.

They found the guy Murderface had spent the last ten minutes praising in the dining room, sitting cross-legged on a cheap rip-off of a fancy dining room table, taking hits from a huge, elaborate hookah. He smiled when he saw Murderface, a lazy and large stoner’s smile, and said, “William! And friends. Who’re you? Want some of this?”

“Nathan, and yeah,” Nathan said. He walked over to the table and took a hit. “Good stuff.”

Pickles watched Nathan and nodded encouragingly. He was wearing a ripped-up tie-dye muscle tank and board shorts, his feet bare and toenails painted a light blue color. Green eyes, freckled shoulders, and long, electrically red hair he wore tied behind his head, flyaway strands framing his face. Not what Nathan was expecting, not the type of guy he imagined Murderface would hang out with, certainly not the type of guy he’d picture as a death metal drummer.

“So you must be the kid Pickles was tellin’ me about,” Pickles said. He didn’t move from his position on the top of his table so Nathan sort of leaned into the side, one hand curled around one of the hookah hoses.

“Guess I am,” Nathan said. He turned around to give Murderface a look but Murderface was no longer in the dining room, Nathan alone with somebody he’d never talked to before. Great.

“How do you know goold ol’ William?” Pickles asked. His eyes were ringed red; Nathan guessed he was at the point in a high where he didn’t give a fuck about anything.

“Met him at a concert,” Nathan grunted. He took another hit off the hookah for lack of things to do. He liked this Pickles guy well enough but couldn’t shake some general suspicion about him and the nature of his character off. “You?” he asked, coughing and pulling the hookah away from his mouth.

“Take it easy, dude,” Pickles said. He had this horrible Yooper accent that really came through on words like _dude_. “I met him at some camp for troubled teens my parents sent me to when I was, well, a teen.” He took another hit from the hookah; Nathan watched him and tried his best to emulate what he did. “How old are you, anyway, Nate?”

“Don’t call me that,” Nathan mumbled. It reminded him of his grandmother. Then, speaking coherently: “I’m twenty-two.”

Pickles laughed. “You’re a fetus.”

“Yeah, well, how old are you?” He had been under the assumption that he was around the same age as Murderface, twenty-eight or so, but something in the way Pickles handled the hookah and laughed was making him suspect he was a lot older.

“ _Thirty_ -two,” Pickles said. “Would you look at that.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” Pickles laughed again and Nathan joined in, the high finally seeping in, making this all seem hilarious and profound.

“Anyway,” Nathan said, straightening up and putting the hookah hose down. He hoisted himself up on the table, letting his legs dangle down off of it. “Murderface says that, uh, you play the drums and you’re interested in joining my band.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Pickles said, waving a hand. “Heard all about it. And yeah, I am. That gig I was in before was, you know, pretty nice, but I’m really looking for a new sound. And death metal just  _speaks_ to me, you  know? I feel that shit in my _soul_.”

“Finally, somebody fucking _gets_ it,”  Nathan said, and he shared the first of many private, understanding smiles with Pickles, over that ridiculous hookah on that dining table in the middle of a shitty party.


	25. Two Firsts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr Request: Murderface and Knubbler's first kiss. Murderface/Knubbler. Homophobic language content warning as usual.

They had two proper first kisses, months between them.

The first was a result of sexual frusturation. Murderface was in the recording studio on the submarine late at night, unable to sleep and presumably by himself, experimenting with some Planet Piss stuff. He was singing, loudly and badly and off-key, his voice scraping the walls. He yelped over the next word of the song when the lights, which had been turned off for atmosphere, came on, bright light jarring. Murderface took his headphones off and looked up from his bass and through the window at a shirtless Dick Knubbler, his eyes scrunched from sleep and hair ruffled.

“The pissch!” Murderface yelled, untangling himself from his bass and walking out, towards Knubbler. He threw his bass in Knubbler’s chair and glared at him.

“I could hear you all the way from my room, William,” Knubbler says. He rubbed at his eyes and sniffed, giving him an expression akin to a mole. “You were sounding good, honey.” He reached out to touch Murderface on the shoulder.

Murderface flinched away, sneering. “Don’t touch me, don’t call me _honey_ —what are you, schome schort of fag?” He had his suspicions, had had them since Knubbler came on the ship. Something about the way he held his hands and conducted himself in conversation.

Knubbler just shrugged and ran a hand through his hair. “Speaking of,” he said. He peered at Murderface, looking him up and down. Murderface drew his arms into himself, crossing them over his chest, uncomfortable. “I’m goin’ crazy now here, babe. How do you guys handle it?”

“What?” Murderface asked, tightening his hold on himself.

“No sex!” Dick’s eyes popped open; he knotted his hands in his hair. “I’m goin’ fucking _insane_!” He untangled his hands and reached out to touch Murderface again, this time grabbing a forearm. “What do you say, babe? Wanna do it?”

Murderface made a face of disgust. “I’m not gay.”

“It’s not gay if you’re on top.” Knubbler was moving progressively closer, his face worryingly serious. Murderface dropped one of his arms down from his chest, the one Knubbler wasn’t stroking, hanging lose and awkward between their bodies.

“I thought it waschn’t gay if the ballsch didn’t touch?” Murderface said through clenched teeth.

"I’ll hold mine out of the way. C’mon, babe. So horny.” Dick was close, close enough that Murderface could smell him—cheap cologne, and he certainly could afford to buy something better, so why the fuck was he wearing cheap cologne, why the fuck was Murderface thinking about that—and Murderface had no choice, really. If asked he would say that Dick cornered him, forced him upon him, but in reality it was Murderface that surged forward and connected their mouths in a hot, slimy kiss. Their tongues wriggled together and over each other’s faces, hands roaming over each other’s bodies. They didn’t get so far as to have sex, as Murderface leaped back from Knubbler when he thought he heard somebody walking and took the opportunity as an out to scurry away. In his tiny submarine room he scowled and pulled his dick, harder than he’d like to admit, out, beating off. Fuck that guy, seriously.

The second one arose more organically. It was almost the inverse of the first, though it started in the same way: Murderface in the recording studio, bass in his arms, fucking around with Planet Piss. Dick was sitting outside and feeding him compliments while not really listening to what he was producing. Murderface had been trying to get Planet Piss off the grounds for years, failing every time, and Dick didn’t expect this to change anytime soon. Still, it gave him something to do most nights, which he appreciated. If he had to pick a favorite out of Dethklok it probably would be William; he couldn’t explain it, but something about them clicked together and meshed well and, wow, that sounded really gay.

Dick was getting lost in his thoughts of his possible homosexuality to the backdrop of Murderface’s scratchy vocals and deep bass. He, of course, remembered the submarine incident of past. He had blamed that largely on mutual sexual frustration and lack of other options. He put a finger to his chin and mused—perhaps that might have been the case, but there had been some sort of _sexual tension_ underlying the occurrence, and perhaps there still was. He cut Murderface’s recording and beckoned him out of the studio.

“The pissch?” Murderface said. He untangled himself from his bass and threw it onto the couch, stomping over to Dick, who was starting to get a sense of déjà vu.

“C’mere, babe,” Dick said. He called everybody babe—that didn’t mean anything, it was a verbal tic by this point. He put both hands on William’s shoulders and leaned forward, pressed their lips together.

Murderface drew back and wiped his mouth off. Dick had been suspecting that and only removed his hands, patiently awaiting Murderface’s reaction. “What the fuck wasch that for?!” Murderface said. He turned his head to the side and spat twice.

“Hmm,” Dick said. He put a hand around the backside of Murderface’s head, his fingers entangling in the frizz, and pulled him forward again to connect their mouths. They were about the same height, Dick rotating his head to get the best angle. Despite Murderface’s apparent disgust he wasn’t breaking apart, instead kissing Dick back, slipping his tongue between their lips first.

That time they _did_ end up having sex, on the couch, Murderface on his back and Dick over him, sliding into him. Murderface clawed at his back, made these cute little whiny noises when Dick would thrust, panted and came in spurts when Dick just lightly brushed his cock. Dick came shortly after, falling onto Murderface’s chest, Murderface wrapping his arms around Dick and holding him close as Dick pulled out and adjusted himself. They laid like that for a while, breathing and coming down and getting very sticky.

“I’m schtill not gay,” Murderface mumbled.

“’Course you’re not, babe,” Dick said, speaking into Murderface’s chest. “Balls didn’t touch.”


	26. little universes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr Request: Skwisgaar/Toki au/fluff. Skwisgaar/Toki. Three fics for the price of one!

**i. romeo and juliet**

The Skwigelfs and the Wartooths had been rivals for quite a long time, back to days of Vikings and probably even before that. The rivalry was lost on the two heirs of this generation, though, like many of the old traditions, along with the family’s wealth. Toki’s parents had joined a cult and squandered their name; Skwisgaar’s mother, who had married into the family, turned promiscuous after the death of her first husband, Skwisgaar’s father. Skwisgaar and Toki were the only heirs of their respective families and like their traditions the bloodline was going to end, as neither of them were about to produce any veritable offspring. Sure, Skwisgaar had many bastard children, but his true love was Toki, and science hadn’t advanced far enough to give two men children.

They liked to joke about it sometimes, laying with each other in one of their huge beds. Their parents had stopped caring about the rivalry as well, Toki’s parents too involved in their religion, Skwisgaar’s in the cocks of many men. “What if we had a kid,” Toki would say to Skwisgaar, speaking the language of his family and running a finger along Skwisgaar’s chest. “It would be funny,” he would explain. “To join our bloodlines.”

Skwisgaar would shrug his shoulders, tug Toki towards him by the long hair. “We can’t,” he would say, in the language of his family. They were rather mutually intelligible, which Toki liked to take as a sign that he and Skwisgaar should be doing this as opposed to dueling or hating each other. “So let’s not worry about it, yeah? Come here.” And Skwisgaar would connect their mouths, and that would be that.

**ii. the most popular kid in school**

The third grade was a tough time for Toki. He was new to school, fresh from Norway, and didn’t have that great of a grasp on English. He was scrawny, especially in comparison with some of the older, hulking fifth graders, overly polite and quiet. Kids liked to call him gay, which was sort of stupid, and a girl, which was also sort of stupid, but these were the things that kids did. He didn’t get beat up, though he got threatened to get beat up several times, and his teacher liked him well enough, but he’d been there for three months and he hadn’t made any new friends.

On Valentine’s Day they made boxes and set them on their desks, allowing students to anonymously leave each other cards during recess, and retrieving them when they came back. Toki found three cards inside of his—one from the girl he ate lunch with sometimes, Abigail, one from Dick Knubbler, who got made fun of even worse than Toki, and one from somebody he didn’t expect to receive one from: Skwisgaar Skwigelf. Skwisgaar was a grade above them and was the coolest kid in the fourth grade, possibly in the whole school. Toki saw him hanging with a third grader that got held back, Nathan, and a boy in the fifth grade, Pickles, sometimes at recess, convening together in a corner of the playground and ignoring everybody else. Toki knew various things about Skwisgaar through the rumor mill: he was Swedish, an immigrant like Toki, he’d already French kissed a girl, his mother was possibly a prostitute. Toki blushed when he saw the card, certain that it was a joke, and decided to take the issue up with Nathan.

“It’s not a joke,” Nathan said. Toki saw that Nathan had many cards on his desk—he was popular with girls—but was holding one in his hands. Toki couldn’t see the full name, but it looked like it started with a P. “Skwisgaar made me give that to you. I even asked him if it was a joke and he said it wasn’t.”

“Reallies?” Toki asked.

“Yeah. He said that you’d probably ask me this. He also said that you should hang out with us at recess tomorrow.”

“Reallies?” Toki asked, again, excitement building.

“Yeah. God, what are you, stupid?” Nathan turned around from Toki, into his desk, and held out the card he had in his hands to examine it more closely. Toki took this as an indication to leave the conversation and skipped over to his desk, happy and satisfied with that Valentine’s Day.

**iii. mermender**

The Grand Prince of the Water Kingdom, Nathan, was holding his annual Mermen Duels, and Toki was seriously considering taking part in them. He had trained for years, his parents grueling him, and had already killed five other mermen, but he had his doubts. He was twenty now, a good age for entering the Mermen Duels, but the outcome was either victory or death.

“I’m not going to tell you that you should enter,” Skwisgaar told him. They were relaxing outside the mouth of a cave, their tails—Skwisgaar’s a luminescent ivory color, Toki’s a duller obsidian with sharper scales—overlapping. “I would not be able to handle it if you died, but I know that it is your calling.”

Toki shook his head, his hair fanning out around him. “My calling isn’t killing,” he said. He closed his eyes. “That’s just what I’m _good_ at.”

“Isn’t that the definition of a calling?” Skwisgaar leaned over and pried Toki’s eyes open with his fingers, looked into them, face serious.

Toki shook his head again and moved Skwisgaar’s hand away. “I think my calling is like yours. Music. But it would disappoint my parents not to enter the Duels.”

“I don’t know if you’re aware of this,” Skwisgaar said. He flexed his tail, rubbing Toki’s in a comforting, intimate gesture. “But your parents are horrible.”

Toki didn’t have a response for that.

They debated the matter some more and were unable to come up with a solution, instead slipping into the cave and having sex. They emerged, holding hands because they couldn’t overlap their tails while swimming, and Skwisgaar swam Toki home. Outside the mouth to Toki’s cave, Toki looked at Skwisgaar, and said, “I’m going to enter the Duels.”

“Okay,” Skwisgaar said. He bit his lip but then released it, squeezed Toki’s hand and swam away.

Toki entered the Duels and Toki won, earning him freedom from his parents and a list of twenty more mermen murdered by his hands. It all felt sort of hollow, afterwards, like he’d lost his purpose in life. He expressed that to Skwisgaar, laying in Skwisgaar’s bedroom, their tails entwined.

“I think you’re right,” Skwisgaar said. He folded his hands over his stomach, at the nape of his tail, his hair floating lazily above his shoulders. “That wasn’t your calling. That was just something you’re good at.”

Toki was tired, exhausted from the Duels, his eyes heavy with exhaustion. “You finally admit that I’m right,” he said. He rolled over, curled into Skwisgaar.

Just before he fell asleep—and probably when Skwisgaar had thought he’d fallen asleep—he heard Skwisgaar whisper “I’m glad you didn’t die” as he pulled him closer and wrapped his arms around him as well as his tail.


	27. Hair-Pulling as an Art Form

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr Request: Skwisgaar or Toki hair pulling. Skwisgaar/Toki.

It started as innocently as it could, or as innocently as it could for _them_ , at least. In the recording studio, Toki standing behind the glass with the guitar in his hands and his headphones over his years, half the lights turned off, just the two of them, late at night. Skwisgaar with his arms crossed over his chest, boots propped up on the soundboard, creating an obtuse angle in the chair. The rest of the guys were out drinking or already passed out, Skwisgaar making Toki stay behind to drill guitar rhythms, working on their second album. Toki, usually a fan of Skwisgaar, was seriously hating him at this moment in time.

“Plays it again,” Skwisgaar said, pressing a button with the heel of his boot. “But betters.”

“I’s already playeds it as good as it’s gonna get,” Toki complained. Skwisgaar only gave him a hardened look; Toki sighed, his fingers picking up into the melody without him instructing them too. Three minutes later he finished, his fingers sore, and looked up at Skwisgaar.

“Betters,” Skwisgaar said. He took his boots off the soundboard and put them on the floor, leaning into the chair to form an acute angle. “But nots de best.”

“Well, you’s de best,” Toki said. It was sarcastic, but not really. “So I can’t plays it as well as you cans. You’s just goin’ to rerecord it anyways, what’s de point?”

“De point is so dat you don’t fucks up onstage!” Skwisgaar rose in his chair and walked into the recording booth. He had his lips sucked to the side, his eyebrows furrowed, his arms still crossed over his chest.

Toki, caught off guard, stood there and watched him, waited for his next move. Skwisgaar took Toki’s headphones off and threw them to the floor before tugging the guitar from Toki’s arms. Toki sputtered in protest—Skwisgaar was handling the guitar pretty badly, especially for him—but was cut short by Skwisgaar’s hands in his hair, tugging, the other one discarding the guitar to the floor before hitting him across the face and letting that hand travel up to join the other one in Toki’s hair. “De fucks?” Toki shouted, doing the logical thing: wrapping his hands in Skwisgaar’s hair and pulling.

“I—I doesn’t knows,” Skwisgaar said, through strained teeth. His hands in Toki’s hair hurt, but in a good way, in a way that was making Toki hard, which wasn’t really new nor surprising. The harder Skwisgaar pulled the harder Toki did, their heads moving slowly but steadily towards each other, their foreheads close enough that Toki’s prickled. “You’s just pisses me off sometimes!” He yanked.

Toki yanked back. “So’s you rips my hair out?” he asked, also through gritted teeth, his hands full of Skwisgaar’s hair. He had to admit it felt nice, silky even; smelled nice, too.

“Ja!” Skwisgaar said. He pushed against Toki until Toki’s back was against the wall, their foreheads knocking into each other, then put his mouth on his, and that wasn’t anything new or surprising either. The struggle with the hair melted into something more affectionate, romantic, intimate, their hands loosening to a holding, their legs working between each other. They ended up on the floor—something else old and unsurprising—and resumed their hair-pulling game, now accompanied by grunts and moans and various noises of sexual pleasure.

Having long hair came with certain annoyances: getting tangled, getting stuck in things, getting in the way when trying to do something. During fighting or sex—which, at this point in time, often mingled together for Skwisgaar and Toki—it made for something to hold onto, to grab at and pull and wrap around their hands. When they were alone they would get each other’s attention by reaching over and tugging on one of the strands that fell over their shoulders, which more often than not would instigate another war that more often than not ended up with them fucking on the floor, bringing the other’s head from the ground by way of their hair. The same happened if they showered together, this time lubricated by shampoo, slippery, sometimes falling, hurting, but it was good because the other was there to kiss it better, to lick the wounds.

They weren’t the only ones to fight among the band (and sometimes they suspected they weren’t the only ones to fuck, either, with some of the glances the others exchanged) but the hair-pulling was sort of _their_ thing, and some sick sort of jealous would flare up when they saw somebody else doing it. Eventually Pickles looked at Skwisgaar and Toki, sitting side-by-side on the couch with their hair tussled up and thighs bumping into each other, and said, “God, you guys are _such_ girls.” And they scowled, hard, both offended by the idea, both still sort of pissed at each other, but then they made eye contact and they started laughing. Laughing hard. Pickles screwed his face up at them and they tried through sputtered, broken fragments of English to explain what was so funny, but they couldn’t. Something to do with their intimate knowledge of each other’s bodies, of each other’s minds, of their shared continuum of masculinity and femininity made it _funny_. Pickles didn’t know that, of course. He just shrugged a shoulder and threw his hands up in the air, left them laughing on the couch, and Skwisgaar leaned over Toki’s lap and tugged on that strand of hair falling over Toki’s shoulder, and they laughed harder, falling into each other, melting.

Occasionally, though, they were gentle. They brushed the tangles out, they worked conditioner through the blind spots. Toki taught Skwisgaar how to braid hair and then let him braid his hair, secretly, alone in their bedrooms and away from the other guys. Because long hair was a part of being metal but it required care. Because they could yank and tug and pull all they want but they meant no harm, not really, not _overall_. Because sometimes they told each other they loved each other, even if they told themselves that they didn’t mean it, not really, not _overall_.


	28. In the Recording Studio

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr Request: Skwisgaar/Toki funny smut where they're caught by the band and Charles. Skwisgaar/Toki.

It was two in the afternoon on a Wednesday, a completely boring day. They had woken up a few hours ago and fucked around in the recording studio, coming up with nothing but frustration. Nathan, Pickles, and Murderface had left in search of lunch, but Skwisgaar and Toki remained, Toki behind the glass and Skwisgaar in front. Toki picked at the strings, his face arranged in a deep scowl, as Skwisgaar messed with the controls and muttered under his breath about terrible Toki was.

Toki’s head snapped up, eyes ablaze, and yelled, “Dis ams stupids! Mines fingers amns’t feelin’s it today, doesn’t tortures them, Skwisgaar.”

“You’s fingers ams _never_ feelin’s it,” Skwisgaar said. He slumped his face in one hand and pushed something on the board to the top with the other. “What ams makes today anys different?”

“ _Wells_ ,”  Toki said, and his voice slipped into that shrill pitch that meant his emotions were rising, “I didn’t’s gets laid last night, for ones.”

“Was tired,” Skwisgaar shrugged. He yawned.

“No, you was too drunks to gets it up and I wasn’t drunks at all and I had to jack off in de bathroom. You’s a terrible boyfriend.” Toki crossed his arms over his chest, his guitar hanging free over his midsection.

“You tells me dat every _days_ ,” Skwisgaar said. He looked up from the controls at Toki, his interested piqued with the image of Toki jerking off in frustration in Skwisgaar’s bathroom. “Why’s not breaks up with me if you amns’t likes me?”

Toki’s lips twitched and he wiggled out from his guitar, setting it down in the booth. He walked from the booth and straight to Skwisgaar, grinning, and deposited himself in Skwisgaar’s lap, the chair groaning as it reclined to adjust both their weights. Skwisgaar’s hand found their rightful places on Toki’s hips, and he was grinning, too, moving his palms up under Toki’s shirt and brushing his thumbs over the hem of Toki’s jeans, dipping them below to feel his hipbones. “’Cause de sex ams so good,” Toki said, a scant whisper of a thing around Skwisgaar’s ear, his tongue swiping around the shell of it.

“Gets a dildo,” Skwisgaar said, but it was absentminded, as he was in the process of rolling Toki’s pants down and pawing at him through his boxers, connecting their mouths. Toki grabbed the back of the chair with one hand, supported as it leaned against the soundboard, and entangled his other in Skwisgaar’s hair. Lips, teeth, tongue slid together and up and down each other’s faces, both of them growing hard and rutting against the other. Through the friction and the tightness Skwisgaar finally got Toki’s pants and boxers down, taking him into his hand and stroking, whispering filthy things in his ear.

“Skwisgaar—” Toki said, choked, as Skwisgaar’s fingers danced around his rim, “amns’t gots any lube.”

“Ja we does,” Skwisgaar said, and he produced a small bottle from his pants pocket. Toki arched his eyebrows but was uncomplaining as Skwisgaar slicked him up, sliding his own jeans down during the process. Toki repositioned himself, his forehead against Skwisgaar’s, and sunk himself down onto Skwisgaar’s cock, his eyes squeezed shut. Skwisgaar ran his thumb down Toki’s eyelashes, closing his own eyes, feeling and sensing and on fire.

They were too involved in each other and too blinded by their pleasure to hear the door to the recording studio opened, but stuttering and stammering drew their attention. Toki froze halfway down Skwisgaar’s dick, and Skwisgaar’s fingers dug into the side of Toki’s thighs as he whipped his head around, an expression of the purest scorn on his face. In the doorway were Nathan, Pickles, Murderface, Charles, even fucking Dick Knubbler, who was the only one seemingly unperturbed. Murderface was dry-heaving, Nathan’s eyes were wide, Pickles was laughing, Charles looked as if he’d seen Satan himself, and Knubbler was just standing there, eyes flashing green.

There were many _uh’s_ and _um’s_ and one notable _holy fucking fuck_ from Nathan until Charles pinched the bridge of his nose between his fingers and Pickles said, “Jesus Christ, Toki, at least get off his dick,” and Toki did, awkwardly clambering off of Skwisgaar’s lap and standing beside the chair, pulling his pants up as fast as he could with his face a deep scarlet. Skwisgaar followed his lead.

“Are you two _gay_?” Murderface yelled, whipping his head around wildly.

“William, sweetie,” Knubbler said, using the tone of voice that a parent would to explain to  their child why  they were not allowed to bring the microwave in the bath with them.

“We left you alone for, like, ten minutes!” Nathan bellowed. “What the fuck!”

Skwisgaar shrugged.

“We’re gonna have to get a new chair,” Pickles said, turning to Charles. Charles nodded, muttered something that sounded like _yes, that is for the best, I will arrange that,_ and pulled out his cell phone, most likely to text the order to a Klokateer.

“Scheriouschly—are you two gay? For real? Really? I’m in a band with a couple of—gay guysch? What the hell? Isch thisch real life?” Knubbler reached out a comforting hand to place on Murderface’s shoulder, but he jerked away, glaring at him. “How could you want to touch a man after scheeing that?”

“Well, William,” Knubbelr said, still with that same gentle tone of voice, “some of us aren’t homophobic, and some of us find this funny.” He giggled into his hand, eyes flicking between Skwisgaar, Toki and Murderface.

“You know what,” Pickles said, throwing his hand up. “I say we forget about the album and get really fuckin’ drunk and try to black that out from our memories, what do you say?”

“Um, wells, I dinks we’s goin’ to stay here, and—” Toki said, glancing at Skwisgaar. Skwisgaar nodded, because despite this uncomfortable encounter he was still aroused, his cock quite lonely all hidden away inside of his jeans.

“Jesus Christ, you two,” Nathan said, and threw an expansive arm across Pickles’s and Charles to lead them away, Knubbler doing the same for Murderface.

Again, Skwisgaar and Toki did not notice when the Klokateer arrived with the new chair, but the Klokateers were much more polite and well-mannered than the band, so they only left the chair in the corner and walked back out the door.


	29. A Return to a Safety

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr Request: The hours after Abigail and Toki are returned to Dethklok. Skwisgaar/Toki.

There was a helicopter waiting to take them back to Mordhaus, where the medical wing was decked out with specialists of all sorts prepped to take care of Toki and Abigail. They ran towards the helicopter and filed in, exhausted but exhilarated. Skwisgaar hadn’t let Toki go since he got his hands on him—save the cosmic god shit that went on when they killed the guy—and the doctors had to literally pry him from Skwisgaar’s arms, explaining to him that they needed to look at his wounds and vitals and nurse him back to health. Some rational part of Skwisgaar’s brain knew this, but every other part of him was on edge, waiting to take ahold of Toki again. He’d always been the type to need to see something to believe it, to touch something to truly know it, and he’d spent months believing Toki to be dead or worse and now he was here and relatively okay and he just wanted to be with him.

While Murderface and Pickles retreated to their rooms for rest and emotional detox, Nathan and Skwisgaar deposited themselves outside of Mordhaus’s medical wing. They sat on the floor with their backs against the wall and their heads tilted back in silence, which was preferable for the both of them. A sort of kinship flickered between them, considering the similar situation they found themselves in, and the presence of the other was enough to feel some extent of comfort.

Nathan was allowed to visit Abigail before Skwisgaar was allowed to visit Toki. The damage done to her, emotionally in addition to physically, was far less, and she was able to deal with it better. Alone outside the medical wing Skwisgaar started to bite his fingernails and wish he had a guitar, but he couldn’t bring himself to request a Klokateer to bring him one. He touched his face and found fresh tearstains, though he had no recollection of crying.

Three hours later a doctor fetched him. The sun was coming up, sending dull light down hallways and into Toki’s hospital room when Skwisgaar walked in. The first thing he noticed was how much less Toki there was—he’d lost weight, definitely starved, his cheeks and chest were hollowed with the structure of his bones showing, and he looked pale and thin in a pale and thin hospital gown underneath pale and thin sheets. Skwisgaar sat on his bed, took one of Toki’s hands in his—he had an IV in a vein, a clear liquid shuttling itself into his body.

Skwisgaar tucked a strand of hair behind Toki’s ear; it looked like he had gotten a haircut. Toki’s eyes were shot and clotted and _scary_. He had said some things before to Skwisgaar, but the first thing he said then was, “I feels safe now,” and his head dropped to the side and he fell asleep. Skwisgaar squeezed his hand and laid down in the hospital bed, took Toki into his arms the best he could in an admittedly tight squeeze, and found the strength within himself to sleep as well.


	30. Don't You Think It's Boring How People Talk?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thanksgiving suburban AU Skwisgaar/Toki. Also Knubbler/Murderface, Charles/Abigail and Nathan/Pickles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> previously untitled so song's from lorde's tennis court (flume remix.) good song, has nothing to do with the fic.

It was Thanksgiving, and because Skwisgaar and Toki hated their immediate family they were inviting over neighbors. Their son William (who preferred the ridiculous moniker of “Murderface”) was coming home from college and bringing along his boyfriend, a guy that actually chose to go by the name of Dick. Besides them the guest list included the only other gay couple in the neighborhood and their closest friends Nathan and Pickles as well as Charles and Abigail. Abigail was the principal of the high school Murderface had gone to and they had gotten well acquainted with her, the amount of times they had been dragged into her office because of some stupid stunt Murderface had pulled. It still embarrassed Skwisgaar in a minute way, enough that he was mixing vodka into his morning glass of orange juice. He’d just gotten down from bed, Toki having been awake for two hours already, his hair still tussled and eyes still crusted with sleep.

Toki was in the process of wrestling a turkey into the oven. Toki couldn’t cook worth shit, had never really learned how to, but he was in charge of preparing the turkey. Skwisgaar refused to put any effort into it (citing exhaustion from work—he worked high up on the IKEA company ladder). Abigail was bringing over desserts and most of the side dishes, Pickles filling in the gaps and bringing his best alcohol.

“You looks like de proper ladies,” Skwisgaar said, smirking at Toki over his glass of orange juice and vodka. It was his favorite joke, though this time it had some root in reality, an apron tied around Toki’s bare chest and pajama pants.

“Doesn’t wants to gets de turkey joice on me,” Toki grunted. He slammed the oven door shut and turned it on and up, rotating to face Skwisgaar and wiping his hands on his apron. Skwisgaar laughed; Toki scowled. “It’s a leggymint concern, Skwisgaar.”

“Whatsever,” Skwisgaar said, smiling. He threw back the rest of his orange juice and placed it on the counter. “What times ams dey all comingks over, again?”

Toki looked behind him to check the clock on the stove; eight in the morning. “We ams picking up Moidaface and his boyfriend in an hours. De rest ams comin’ over at three.”

“Okays,” Skwisgaar said. He walked over to Toki and put a hand on his hip, bended down to nip at his neck. “Ams gonna takes de shower, you wants to join?” He toyed with the strings of Toki’s apron and Toki nodded, moved to connect their mouths. They’d been married for twenty-three years and were in the mid-forties, but they had the best sex life of any couple Toki knew, including the recently married young ones.

An hour later and they were ready to pick up Murderface. They dressed warm for the weather, Skwisgaar in the olive green v-neck sweater Toki had gotten him for Christmas last year, Toki in the coral pink argyle sweater vest that he loved to death and Skwisgaar vehemently hated. Skwisgaar tied his hair behind his head and Toki slipped into his loafers, grabbing his keys from his bedside table. They took Toki’s car, a 2012 Honda Civic, because Skwisgaar drove some tiny, impractical European thing that, while admittedly smooth and luxurious, only seated two people. Skwisgaar bitched about Toki’s driving the entire way to the airport but still held Toki’s hand on the console between them.

They got there shortly before Murderface’s flight arrived. Skwisgaar went to the crowded Starbucks and stood in line for twenty minutes to get both him and Toki a regular cup of black coffee while Toki waited for Murderface’s plane to arrive, playing Candy Crush on his phone to pass the time. Skwisgaar returned with the coffee and gave one to Toki, who thanked him and turned his attention towards the terminal. People began to leak out, Toki spotting Murderface’s _unique_ hair and style of dress instantly and waving him over.

Murderface was with a guy dressed in khakis, a pea coat and a scarf that covered his chin, chin-length and stringy blond hair trapped beneath a wool cap. They walked close but did not touch each other. Toki took Murderface into a hug when he appeared, fighting off the urge to cry, and Skwisgaar shook Dick’s hand, unable to hide the judging look on his face.

“William,” Toki said, drawing back from the hug before crushing Murderface to his chest again. Murderface grunted in protest. “I’s missed yous so much.”

“It’sch _Murderface_ , god, Dad,” Murderface said. He and Toki were roughly the same height. Toki just shook his head and released his son, switching him with Dick. Skwisgaar shook Murderface’s hand as well, though he also clapped him on the back and smiled.

“You must be Dick,” Toki said, though he knew that already from the pictures on Mruderface’s Facebook. “I’s heards so much about yous! You ams a businesses major, rights?”

Dick nodded. “Which one of you’s Toki, which one of you’s Skwisgaar?” he asked, looking back and forth between Skwisgaar and Toki. He had a high, nasal voice, but considering who their son was, Skwisgaar and Toki were used to annoying voices.

“Ams Skwisgaar, dat’s Toki,” Skwisgaar said, pointing his thumb at himself and then Toki. “Don’t calls us dat, dough, doesn’t you has manners?”

“Doesn’t be a dick to Dicks,” Toki said to Skwisgaar. He laughed at himself for the unintentional wordplay and then returned his attention to Dick. “You cans calls me Mr. Wartooth and hims Mr. Skwigelf.”

“I thought you guys were married?” Dick said, tilting his head. Murderface groaned in the background.

“We keeps ours names,” Toki said by way of explanation. He pulled his phone from his pocket with the hand that wasn’t holding his coffee and checked the time. “Looks at de times, dough, we shoulds gets goingks.”

He and Skwisgaar turned to leave, assuming Murderface and Dick would follow, drinking coffee and giving each other facial expressions that translated into _that guy’s weird_ and _Murderface seems to have gained even more weight_. They could’ve talked in their respective original tongues, Swedish and Norwegian, but it was possible that Murderface might’ve picked up a phrase here or there. Still, Toki heard Dick ask Murderface about their accents and their English, and he gave Skwisgaar a look that very clearly said _I don’t like this guy_.

They returned home after an appropriately awkward drive. Toki left Dick and Murderface to get situated in Murderface’s old room—they’d be staying there until Sunday—and went to check on the turkey while Skwisgaar went to their bedroom, saying he needed to play some guitar to calm himself down. Skwisgaar had been in several bands when he was younger—that’s how he and Toki met, at auditions to be a guitarist for a band that they both got into—and was a pretty kick-ass guitar player, but they’d made the more practical decision of getting jobs and doing the normal person thing after that band broke up. Skwisgaar worked his way up from being an employee at IKEA while Toki waited tables in a restaurant for a while, debating if he wanted to go to school, but before he could make a decision Skwisgaar was making more than enough money for the both of them, and they were engaged and looking for houses. Still Skwisgaar retained his love of guitar and Toki could hear it filter through the air vents as he took the turkey from the oven and covered it with tinfoil before putting it in the refrigerator.

Murderface watched television in the living room with Dick while Toki and Skwisgaar went about cleaning and setting up. It was nice to have Murderface back in the house, even if they probably would grate on each other’s nerves by the time Sunday came. When they looked to adopt Skwisgaar and Toki had wanted a girl, preferably one of Scandinavian origins, but something about Murderface had caught their eye. His utter ugliness appealed to them, really, and the brutal backstory of his father killing his mother and then himself with a chainsaw. So instead of a cute little Scandinavian infant they ended up with a two-year-old hick from Nebraska, and here they were seventeen years later, and Toki was going to get emotional if he kept thinking about this. He couldn’t help it, and he suspected Skwisgaar to be having similar thoughts, since they kept making such meaningful eye contact as they swept the kitchen floor and put knives on napkins.

Charles and Abigail arrived ten minutes before three, both holding dishes. They said their hellos and Toki swept Abigail into the kitchen, putting the cakes and pies she’d brought into the refrigerator and placing the dishes on the table, the turkey already there. Charles and Skwisgaar talked about boring business market things—Charles was a lawyer for the largest corporation in the tristate area—and moved towards the living room. Nathan and Pickles showed up soon afterwards, Nathan with the rest of the food in his arms and Pickles’s full of bottles, and soon afterwards they sat down to eat dinner.

Skwisgaar was at one end of the table and Toki at the other. Charles, Abigail and Murderface sat on one side, Nathan, Pickles and Dick opposite them. Skwisgaar cut the turkey, complaining about the way Toki had cooked it and causing the rest of the table to laugh, and then they passed around dishes, serving themselves and piling their plates high with food.

“Thanks for inviting us over,” Abigail said, smiling over a plate with mostly food she’d prepared herself.

“Yeah, real nice,” Pickles added, spearing a piece of turkey. “I hate my family, y’know? And Nate’s parents are dead. It’s good to have friends.”

“Agreeds,” Skwisgaar said.

“So, uh, if you don’t mind me asking, who is everybody?” Dick asked, leaning into the table and looking around.

Toki let everybody go around and introduce themselves, and Dick nodded after each one. “Who’re _you_?” Nathan asked when they got to him.

“Dick Knubbler.” Nathan choked on his own laughter.

After they ate dinner they returned to the living room and distributed themselves among the couches and chairs, putting the television on and bullshitting. Murderface and Dick excused themselves, presumably to take a nap upstairs, and Toki and Skwisgaar grimaced. When the sun set they returned to the dining room for dessert, Murderface and Dick reappearing as if summoned by the idea of more food, and drinks. As everybody either walked to this house from their own in the neighborhood or were staying there getting drunk wasn’t a problem, so they got drunk as shit, including the underage Murderface and Dick Knubbler. Skwisgaar and Toki had stopped caring about following silly American drinking laws by the time Murderface had turned sixteen, which reminded them of several horrible stories involving a young Murderface that they told to their friends and to Dick, who was crying with laughter by the time they finished. The other couples filtered out after nine or so, thanking Skwisgaar and Toki for hosting, Charles and Abigail saying that they would next year.

It was, overall, a standard Thanksgiving. But their standard Thanksgiving, free from annoying sentiment and hated family members, instead surrounded only by those they chose to spend time with and stuffed with food prepared by much better cooks than them themselves, was pretty fucking good.


	31. don't cry

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> this city is for sleeping and the clocks are all set by feel. Skwisgaar/Toki post-Doomstar h/c. Pachuca Sunrise by Minus the Bear will greatly increase your reading experience.

He’s used to warm baths with lots of bubbles, toys to play with and safe finger-paints to splatter on the wall while he soaks, a servant waiting with a warm and fluffy towel after he decides he’s finished. But that’s in his quarters and that’s not where he is right now. He’s standing in a shower, shivering even though the water’s hot, arcing over his back so that the stream does not hit his body directly but instead rains small drops onto sensitive skin. His arms are folded beneath him on the tile of the wall, the impersonal white tile that checkerboards down to the impersonal white tile of the floor, an ornate drain, a glass door. He’s in Skwisgaar’s shower, his minimalist taste almost suffocating him, and he’s crying, he’s crying so fucking hard.

His face is bloated, he can feel the sting around his eyes and the tenderness of his cheeks, his face reddening and the tears won’t fucking stop, the lump in his throat is growing like a cancerous tumor, like he’s about to fucking _die_. His back shakes in and out of the stream of water. He’s cold, he’s so cold, and his eyes are open but his vision is dark, veiled by the same memories that have followed him around for years. There’s new memories now, another dark place that he was pushed down, another man, another circumstance. He is not coherent, thoughts flying at him in two different languages that he has forgotten how to speak, scary sentence fragments with broken punctuation. He’s thinking in images, in shapes and colors and motion, and his forehead hits the tile. He wants to bang the bad images out and away but some self-preservation instinct leftover from millions of years ago is preventing him from doing so.

It goes on like that for a while.

The door to the bathroom is open, he was too hurried to shut it, and he doesn’t know why he rushed to the shower anyway, so there’s no creak or squeak to listen to, just the soft smacking of footsteps against a tiled floor. There is a door to the shower but it doesn’t make sound as it opens. There are arms around him, the flow of the water disrupted, and he stops shaking. Hands creep around and take his arms down from pressing against the wall; he had been unaware that his muscles had started to hurt. Those same hands hold his wrists in front of him, nudging his body backward, so that the stream of water hits his chest. A sudden burst of warmth.

“Ams okay.” He feels it more than hears it, the thrum of a voice sending vibrations through his body that start in the junction of neck and shoulder. Over and over it reverberates, tiny circles in a pond. Ams okay, ams okay, ams okay. It reaches his brain, takes all of the circuitry and ties it into a hammock to sleep in, makes him stop crying, makes him believe it.


	32. images a child needs to help them sleep

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> i used to dream of  
> adventure  
> when i was younger  
> with lungs miniature  
> (amsterdam by daughter)
> 
> Skwisgaar/Toki childhood AU preslash thing I wrote for Christmas/my birthday.

Toki was twelve when the stranger came to town. He had a distinguished profile and seemed to attract women, flocking towards him like avian things, but he seemed uninterested. He carried a guitar on his back and wore a cap on his head, a leather jacket over a ripped t-shirt over a thermal shirt, his knees poking through rips in his jeans. Toki saw him first when he slid into the music shop, then a second time sitting on a bench, playing his guitar for all to hear. Some people threw money at him, but Toki only threw his wide-eyed attention.

The stranger ceased his playing when he realized Toki had been staring at him for a while. “Who are you?” he asked—Swedish, spoken in a Swedish accent. He had a warm, low voice, a sort of fire lit behind his eyes.

“Toki Wartooth,” Toki whispered. His parents had sent him on the hour-long journey to town himself to buy groceries and he was going to be punished for being late, but he couldn’t help it, the stranger’s playing was so beautiful. “I haven’t seen you here before.”

The stranger shook his head, his hair swinging around his head. “I’m not from here. I’m from Stockholm.”

“Oh,” Toki said. “I’ve never been anywhere but here and my house.”

“Where’s your house?”

“About an hour away.”

“And you’re here by yourself? Where are your parents? How old are you?” The stranger furrowed his eyebrow. He seemed like he was struggling to keep something out of his voice, maybe a tone of judgment, maybe a tone of concern—Toki was twelve, not good at reading people yet.

“I’m twelve,” Toki said. “My parents sent me to buy groceries.” He tilted his head.

Skwisgaar shook his head, the way he looked at Toki making Toki vaguely uncomfortable but also intrigued. He wanted to step closer and so he did. “Well, my name is Skwisgaar,” the stranger—Skwisgaar, now—said, the strain still in his voice. “I’m seventeen. I ran away from home.”

“Oh, cool!” Toki perked up. “I kind of always wanted to do that.”

Skwisgaar’s eyes shifted as he looked at Toki, and Toki became self-conscious, his knees turning into each other and his arms crossed over his chest. “Toki,” Skwisgaar said, saying his name like an experimental whisper of a deadly curse, his arms twitching with momentum. “Toki, are your parents nice to you?”

“I don’t understand what you mean,” Toki said. It was his turn to furrow his brow and narrow his eyes. “Aren’t everybody’s parents nice to them?”

“No, some people have mean parents that hit them or—well, are mean to them,” Skwisgaar said. He slid his guitar into his case and Toki got the feeling he was avoiding looking at Toki. “I want to know if your parents are like that.”

“Um.” Toki bit his lip, feeling a lump in his throat. Every part of him but his brain wanted to say yes, to tell the stranger—Skwisgaar, now—about the punishments and the punishment holes and everything else that happened in his household on a regular basis. But his brain knew that he wasn’t supposed to tell for many reasons: his parents were respected in their community, it wasn’t that bad, and most of all, Toki deserved it.

“Toki,” Skwisgaar said. “Come here.” Toki stepped forward and Skwisgaar put his hands on Toki’s bony shoulders. Toki was small for his age, skeletal, knees and shoulders nothing but knobs on twigs. He wasn’t really dressed for the weather, wearing what he always wore, shorts, a short-sleeved shirt, tennis shoes and huge socks that bunched around his ankles. “You can tell me. It’s okay.”

Toki wasn’t sure what it was about Skwisgaar. There was just something in his face, in his eyes, that reminded him of something he couldn’t place his fingers on. It was almost electric, a tension that was also a comfort hanging in the air between them. Whatever it was, it prompted Toki to bite harder on his lip and nod his head, his hair brushing along his jawline.

There was a pause and then Skwisgaar nodded his head once and pulled Toki towards him. “It’s going to be alright,” Skwisgaar said, his voice the most strained Toki had heard it. In a quieter voice that Toki wasn’t quite sure he was supposed to hear: “Great, I can barely feed myself and now I’m responsible for a kid, but it’s going to be alright. We can manage.”

It was silly, really, but with his guitar over his back and that fire behind his eyes Skwisgaar grabbed onto Toki’s wrist and lead him out of Lillehammer. A snowstorm picked up and pecked at their skin but Skwisgaar marched on, dragging Toki until Toki cried of fatigue and cold, and then they stowed themselves away in a home for children like them, a place that gave them warm beds and offered no questions. The snow had faded by the time they left the next day, bellies full of good food, and Toki was crying again, this time out of delight as opposed to fear. Skwisgaar asked him if there was anything he needed from home and Toki said no, just that he had a doll that he was going to miss very much, and Skwisgaar promised that one day he would buy Toki another, even better doll. (He would keep that promise and would spend some of the first money he got on a teddy bear that he took to a toymaker’s and had them fashion into something more appropriately brutal. Toki would sleep with it for the rest of his life.)

They went back and forth between Sweden and Norway for a while, zigzagging across the border. Skwisgaar played in bands for a few weeks at a time and roomed with those guys, introducing Toki as his brother, devising a story of abuse that didn’t actually match either of theirs. But that got old fast, and when Toki was thirteen they ended that game.

They went south, to Amsterdam, where they stayed. 


	33. fairy light love confessions

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Skwisgaar/Toki teenager AU.

After Toki gets kicked out of his parents’ house and starts renting an apartment of his own, Skwisgaar decides to take their relationship beyond _occasional_ fuckbuddies to _frequent_ fuckbuddies. It’s a lot more convenient—the apartment is in Skwisgaar’s name, as he’s twenty-one while Toki’s seventeen, so he should have a right to be there, when while Toki was living with his parents it was a hassle to arrange meetings. They christen the place on every feasible surface, and Skwisgaar and Toki are happy, tossing wide grins each other’s ways and preparing microwavable meals to eat on the floor in front of the television. Toki can’t afford a couch, the television a housewarming gift from Pickles.

The first decoration that Toki adds to his room is a string of Christmas lights that loops around the wall, meeting in a bouquet along the headboard of the bed that came with the apartment. He spends a lot of time in his room alone, his homework on the bed in front of him—he is serious about grades, he wants to go to college and become a translator, or maybe a linguist—with the main lights off and those Christmas lights on, giving the room a soft, delicate atmosphere. Skwisgaar will come in and scoop Toki into his arms on the bed, his features softened by the light, and Toki will kiss his nose and tell him not now, I have work to do, I have a test coming up, this is important, Skwisgaar.

It’s a day like that, but Toki’s kicked his homework aside, his math textbook falling to a page three chapters back about parabolas beside the floor of his bed. Skwisgaar’s face is buried in Toki’s hair, his lips moving down his scalp to the base of his neck, and Toki is laughing because Skwisgaar is tickling his sides, his legs kicking and face drawn up into almost a caricature of himself. They shift so they kiss properly, Toki with his knees bracketing Skwisgaar’s low body, Skwisgaar with his head against the headboard, lights serving as a halo around his head. Toki leans down, tells him he’s beautiful.

Skwisgaar tells him he’s been a lot happier since he left his parent’s house.

Toki bites his lip and nods, leans back to remove his shirt before crouching again. Skwisgaar’s hands find his chest. They roll around in bed, screwing around but never getting quite to screwing, lazy and hazy and lovely.

And it’s then, afterwards, on their backs and surveying Toki’s slowly-becoming-personalized room, that they tell each other at the same time, in their respective first languages, that they love each other.


	34. Hooves and Wings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Skwisgaar/Toki centaur/birdperson-from-Doomstar AU.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i literally dreamed about this and wrote it down so

Centaurs were known through the land for their insurmountable pride and arrogance but also for their gorgeous bodies and faces, galloping through the woodlands more as forces of natures than citizens of the forest. They moved in packs, carrying axes and bows and even instruments, their long hair fanning behind them and decked with crowns of flowers and thorns. They were almost unapproachable, convinced it was their right to rule the kingdom because of their strength and more innate humanness, and a chance meeting with one never ended well.

On the other hand, bird people were shyer, both careful and carefree. They flew too high to be seen as anything other than specks in the sky and made their nests in the sparse trees of the mountains. They stole clothes from the human villages in the east and west and wore them to tatters, their leader fixing a headdress out of fallen feathers and colorful scraps of fabric. Like the centaurs they were a rare creature, more for their own protection than out of pride and arrogance, for they were considered second-class citizens of the forest that pandered to humans. (It was not uncommon for a bird person to sheath their wings and mate with a villager.)

A centaur and a bird person had never met in recorded history.

Until Skwisgaar and Toki.

It was by accident. Toki’s wing folded in on itself during a routine scan over the forest and he fell, snagging himself on a tree. His tears fell from his face like rain to the dirt floor and he was stuck there for hours until he heard the stamping of a centaur herd. He had been petrified, certain that he was about to die, until he realized that the herd was curving away from him and he relaxed. He was still certain of death—no amount of thrashing had freed his wings and he would starve here, unable to move. But then he heard the soft pattering of a single set of hooves coming his way.

The centaur that emerged was larger than usual with a white horse’s body and a pale torso, long unadorned blond hair, a sharp face. Toki’s heart picked up. He’d never seen one before, and they were so much more beautiful than he expected them to be, even with all he’d heard. The centaur marched to him, his arms free as he carried a guitar on his back, and cocked his head.

“You’re stuck in a tree?” he asked, his tone making it clear he found the situation idiotic but humorous.

“Um,” Toki stammered, because now not only were his wings all tied up, but his tongue, too. He felt unworthy, scrawny with his skimpy brown wings, and he thrashed like a month caught in a light bulb again.

The centaur laughed and reached up to remove the branches from around Toki’s wings, then walked forward so Toki would fall onto his back instead of the floor of the forest. Toki’s bare chest pressed into the centaur’s coarse hair, and it was an interesting feeling indeed.

“Don’t you have a herd to get back to?” were Toki’s first word to the centaur as he galloped away from the sound of the rest. The centaur only shrugged.

They learned each other’s name and rank—Skwisgaar Skwigelf the centaur prince, Toki Wartooth the bird person scout—as Skwisgaar nursed Toki back to health. Toki could not fly at all with his badly broken wings and Skwisgaar took him to a trusted friend, a dwarf trained in the art of medicine by the name of Murderface, to set his wing. Murderface told them it would take about two months before Toki could fly again and they spent those two months living by themselves, scoping out sections of the forest that other creatures didn’t venture towards to avoid gossip, grooming each other and growing close. They let go of their previous prejudices, Toki learning a centaur could be both nice and haughty, Skwisgaar learning that bird people weren’t dumb savages. Towards the end of the two months Skwisgaar even began to teach Toki the guitar.

One morning they woke up, Skwisgaar folded on his knees and Toki tucked into his side, and Toki found he could stretch his wings. He gave a cautious thump and was surprised when his body lifted from the ground. Skwisgaar smiled, sleepily, and stood. Toki fluttered up to Skwisgaar’s face, smiled back, leaned in, and kissed him, and it felt just as natural as it was actually unnatural.               

“Do we have to part ways?” Toki asked when they separated, one of Skwisgaar’s hand on his face.

“I see no way for us to be together,” Skwisgaar said, and Toki leaned in to kiss the growing crease in Skwisgaar’s forehead. He wrapped his wings, already tired with the effort of staying afloat, around Skwisgaar’s body and pulled him closer.

“I have an idea,” Toki said, talking with his forehead against Skwisgaar’s. “On my scouting missions I saw another forest past the village. Maybe—maybe they aren’t as prejudiced there.”

And so they went, a renegade centaur prince and bird person scout, and they indeed found a lack of prejudice and more peaceful community. And they lived. Together. Happily, ever after.


	35. A Realization in Five Acts

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Skwisgaar and Toki have both dated girls that look like each other, so clearly they're CANONLY GAY, GUYS. Skwisgaar/Toki.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> fun facts: this is the fic i've gotten the most notes on on tumblr ever!

i.

She was easily the most beautiful girl Toki had ever seen, and that was saying something, as he had his regular pick of porn stars and models alike. She was tall—taller than him, even, and he was a little over average height for a man—svelte, sophisticated. Something in her face made it clear that she knew she was better than you and unafraid to show it; the idea of forcing her to submit to him made him more than a little hard. As soon as he saw her at the club he was captivated, sliding in across from her with a smoothness he hadn’t known he possessed, picking her up easily. Their banter was flirty, friendly, fun, and he wanted to talk to her for hours, loved the fire she lit inside of him.

So, he took her as his date.

For a formal event she didn’t dress up, but neither did he, so he supposed it didn’t matter. The scant black shirt she wore showed off her hips, her jeans hanging low and in place with a studded silver belt, hair long and loose as a Viking’s. Badass. Toki smirked for the pictures, smug, proud of himself.

Afterwards, after fucking her and letting her lose into the world, Pickles slung an arm around Toki at the after party and said in a drunken slur, “Toki, were you aware that your date looked exactly like Skwisgaar but with, like, tits?”

And Toki went red because, no, he had not.

ii.

She was easily the most beautiful girl Skwisgaar had ever seen, and that was saying something, as he had his regular pick of porn stars and models alike. Something in her face was earnest, innocent and pure, attracting him, but she also had a mysterious allure about her. He wanted more than to just fuck her—he wanted to poke around inside her head, get to know her, ask her what her favorite color was. She smiled at him, tucked her hair behind her ear, and he was _set._ It fit—with this normal jack-off life he should try to ascertain a normal jack-off wife, and here she was with her strong features that managed to convey a sense of softness, the blue of her eyes warmer than his own.

So, he talked to her.

He go to know her. Her favorite color: all of them. She liked to bake, she wanted to go to college to become a veterinarian but was unable to because of her parents. Further on in their relationship Skwisgaar learned that they’d been abusive to her, and she showed him an old scar that wrapped around her ankle from punishments past that he pressed his fingers into as he kissed her. He fell in love, maybe—he didn’t know, he’d never been in love before. All he knew was that she made him want to hold hands in public and think about names for future children.

But he was wrong, and she was not the great love of his life. When Dethklok collected him he realized this, realized how easy it was for him to leave her behind. She’d been nice, a substitute or a symbol, a summary of all the love he wanted to give and receive in return, but she hadn’t been _true._ He didn’t know what that meant, exactly, didn’t know how to explain, just knew that though she had been a perfectly nice girl—and a damn beautiful one at that—she wasn’t right for him.

A few days later, sitting at the kitchen table in Mordhaus and idly watching the news, Nathan approached him and cleared his throat. “Skwisgaar,” he said, “I’ve been thinking about this for uh, a few days, and, uh, don’t you think your ex-girlfriend looks maybe a little like how Toki did when he first joined the band? That’s gay, man. That’s really fuckin’ gay,”

And Skwisgaar went white because, no, he had not.

iii.

When the next date Skwisgaar brought to the next charity dinner looked exactly like Toki but in a navy dress with braided brunette pigtails and Toki kept bringing home leggy blue-eyed blondes, the rest of Dethklok figured it out, and took it upon themselves to intervene.

iv.

“Okay, guys,” Pickles said, slamming a bottle of booze down on the table and crossing his arms over his chest. “We gotta talk to you about something.”

“Talks, den,” Skwisgaar said, fingers ghosting over his guitar. He’d been sitting in the dining room practicing absently, Toki across the table and watching him intently.

“You two keep fucking girlsch that look like each other and it’sch really fucking weird,” Murderface exclaimed, eyes bugging out of his head.

“I thought we agreed we would present it more. _Tactfully_ ,” Nathan muttered to Murderface, but Skwisgaar and Toki weren’t paying attention to that as they were too busy looking at each other and balking.

Skwisgaar’s eyes skimmed Toki’s face and his mind flashed back to that girl from Sweden—the defined jaw, the straight nose, the narrow eyes. He flashed back to the shirt Toki’d liked wearing when he had joined the band, realized it was the exact same fucking color as the one she had worn. Toki was doing much the same thing, thinking about that girl from all those years ago in those low-slung jeans with the fucking belt, wondering how he hadn’t seen that before. And, of course, they were both now visualizing having sex with the man across from the table from them, disgusted at themselves for how _not_ disgusted at the idea that they were.

Nathan, Pickles, and Murderface were all involved in an argument over something unrelated, but again, Skwisgaar and Toki didn’t notice, because they picked themselves up off the table and stalked off to Skwisgaar’s room to explore this particular conundrum themselves.

v.

“Huh,” Skwisgaar said, scrubbing his fingers into Toki’s scalp as his head lay on his chest after a good hour of very hardcore, very homosexual sex, “I dinks we probablies should’ves dones this sooner.”

“Yeah,” Toki said, yawning, one side of his mouth pressing into Skwisgaar’s sticky skin. “Probablies.”


	36. The Great Submarine Biology Adventure

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Once upon a time in Andrea Wargelf Apollos's junior year of high school, she was procrastinating on studying for a biology test and just wanted to write Skwisgaar/Toki fic. Somebody suggested she combine the two. This is the result.

“Skwisgaar, ams bored.”

They’ve been on the submarine for maybe a week–Skwisgaar, never particularly caring for the passage of time anyway, has lost count in the darkness of the water and the tedium of the days themselves–and Toki is laying across the end of Skwisgaar’s bed, shirtless and slick with sweat. They’d come back here to have sex, but have given up, too tired and too hot, reclining with their limbs overlapping and heads swimming.

“Does something,” Skwisgaar yawned.

“Likes what,” Toki said, and his head twitched as if he wanted to move it, and maybe he made a great effort towards that, but he ultimately failed and continued to stare at the ceiling.

“I don'ts know. Practices you’s guitars for one times. Sucks my dick. Learns biology. I doesn’t know.”

“What was dat?” Toki’s head whipped around, eyes blasted. “De dings you says in de last place?”

“Learns biology?” Skwisgaar said, popping an eyebrow in Toki’s direction.

“Yeah. Dat. Thanks, Skwisgaar!” And Toki bounded off the bed with energy Skwisgaar could not fathom possessing. Skwisgaar wasn’t about to complain; the absence of another body in the bed made it cooler, and he drifted off to sleep, completely forgetting this inane conversation.

* * *

“Heys, Skwisgaar, did you knows dat alleles differ by only a fews bases but otherwise ocucpies de same locus?”

“What does dat even mean, Toki?”

“Well, a locus ams–”

“Doesn’t actually care.”

Toki crossed his arms in a huff and roller-skated away.

* * *

“Hey Skwisgaar, did you knows dat homologous chromosomes have de same genes in de same sequences but not necessarily de same alleles?”

“You’s a homologous chromosome, Toki.”

“So’s you. But we has de different alleles! Makes us specials.”

Skwisgaar looked at him like he was quite possibly the stupidest thing in the ocean. And there were many, many stupid things in the ocean.

* * *

“I was reading in de library, and in meiosis, de only  _real_ difference is dat de homologous chromosomes pairs do de crossing over, and den dey, instead of de sister chromatids, ams what goes through de process.”

“Dat sounds kind of sexuals, Toki. Comes here.”

Toki rolled towards Skwisgaar, sitting on the workout bench. Skwisgaar reached up to wrap his hands around Toki’s back, Toki bending down to bring his mouth to Skwisgaar’s. He separated, briefly.

"Also, dere ams no S phase before meiosis II.”

“Shuts up, Toki.”

“No, dis next part ams totally brutals. Things can goes wrong! Likes de chromosome won’t separates properlies during anaphase I or II and so one gamete can has more den one and one can has less! Dey dies a lot, but sometimes dey survives. Down’s syndrome ams a big one. Dere’s ones wit de sex chromosomes, too, like one where de female only has de X, dat’s called Turner’s syndrome, and one where a boy has two X’s and a Y’s, dat’s Kleinfelter’s, and one where he has two y’s, but dat’s only XYY syndrome, and for a long time people thoughts dat made them really brutal and agressives. Dat’s only a stereotypes, but it does makes dem really big and manlies.”

“Sounds like Nathans. Shuts up, seriously, doe,” Skwisgaar said, and he pulled Toki back towards him.

* * *

“Dids you ever wants to know what blood type you has? Dat’s kind of brutal. Blood and stuff.” The five of them were sitting at a table in the cafeteria, eating lunch with limp wrists and struggling with their forks. Toki was only faking, as was Skwisgaar, to preserve their image, and they were both considerably brighter and cheerier than their bandmates.

As a result, Toki was met with three pairs of glaring green eyes and a, “God, no, Toki, we don't  _care_ ,” from Nathan.

“Ja,” Skwisgaar added, and Toki only rolled his eyes.

“Fines. I won'ts tells you de totallies cools secret.” And under his breath, he explained A and B’s codominance, O’s repressiveness, and how the positive and negative signs come from the Rh factor. Even about erythroblastosis fetalis, which he was sure they would’ve wanted to hear about it, since it involved the death of a second Rh positive fetus inside an Rh positive mother. Skwisgaar squeezed his knee at the end, let him know he was listening.

* * *

“If we ever has children, dere’s a good chance dey’ll be geneticskally healthy, ‘cause I doesn’t have any of de genes disease and you doesn’t either,” Toki said to Skwisgaar.

Skwisgaar took the rag he’d been wiping his face with after a heavy workout session and threw it at Toki. “Dat’s impossible,” he said, rolling his eyes. “We can'ts have children.”

“Woulds you wants to, doe?” Toki swirled on his skates, his hair flouncing behind them. For some reason, he feared Skwisgaar’s answer.

Skwsigaar glared at him. “I has more children den I can count, thanks you very much. Why'ds I needs more?”

“'Cause dey’d be mine,” Toki said, and Skwisgaar rolled his eyes.

“Why'ds dere be a low chance?” he asked.

“'Cause de problems go on de X chromosomes and we only has one X chromosome 'cause we’s men. Ams called _sex-linkage_.”

“Does all dis biology stuffs sound like pornos?”

“Sometimes,” Toki admitted. “Makes me kinds of hornies.” He skated Skwisgaar’s way.

* * *

“You’s still bored?” They were back in Skwisgaar’s bedroom, once more laying on Skwisgaar’s bed, both naked and heaving. They’d manage to have sex this time, and they were laying in the foggy, humid aftermath, smell of sex amplified and their bodies feeling fuzzy.

“Noes, not reallies,” Toki said. He rolled over on his stomach, nuzzled Skwisgaar’s ankle. When they’d separated, Skwisgaar flouncing back like a dog unknotting, Toki’d fallen forward, placing them at opposite ends of the bed. “Was kinds of cool, doe. I was homeschooled a lots and mines parents only taughts me de religious stuff.”

“Ohs,” Skwisgaar said, and as he’d received a basic biology education–as well as physics and chemistry–in high school in Sweden, Toki’s interest made a lot more sense. “Ohs,” he repeated. “Comes here.”

Skwisgaar took Toki into his arms, pressing chest-to-back even though it was hot as fuck and their sticky skin rubbed together uncomfortably. They fell asleep, blissful, and Toki dreamed of karyotypes and amniocentesis.


	37. Apodyopis & Gymnophoria

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr request for a writing meme.
> 
> Apodyopis - The act of mentally undressing someone.  
> Gymnophoria - The sensation that someone is mentally undressing you.
> 
> Skwisgaar/Pickles.

It’s sort of uncomfortable at the party. Everything is too much—the music is too loud, there’s too many people, the girls are too pushy, the booze is too strong and the drugs are too killer. This is the way Pickles likes it, and he’s currently gyrating on a tabletop, stripping out of his clothes and people are laughing and shoving dollar bills and quarters at him. This isn’t Skwisgaar’s style, though, he’s classier—he’s not that classy, really, but he’s classier than  _this_ —and he’s farther back, away from the crowd, arms crossed over each other and watching Pickles. He’s shirtless, but the short he’s wearing are hanging low on his hips, and Skwisgaar’s mind is doing that annoying thing where it reacts to anybody attractive, and the way Pickles’s stomach sucks into a strip of red hair, well, he’s never been completely straight anyway. His eyes go lower, get stuck.

Pickles is fucked, which isn’t unusual nor out of place, and he’s not going to remember a lick of this in the morning, and somehow he’s found himself on top of a table and there’s money being shoved at his thighs and he’s moving so hard so fast his dreads are flying everywhere, and he’s pretty sure there’s people looking at him, they’re all looking at him, and so he thrusts, but he can’t shake this feeling that there’s somebody in particular somewhere, that’s peeling his clothes off even faster than he can, and fuck, he is peeling them off as fast as possible, it’s so good, it’s so fucking much and it’s so fucking good.


	38. Anagapesis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Skwisgaar and Toki. Same meme. The feeling when one no longer loves someone they once did.

It ends in the opposite way that it begins: slowly, carefully, painfully. It’s not a messy hook-up behind the venue out of desperate need and want, it’s not a hand shoved down the front of jeans that are entirely too tight, it’s not teeth sinking into the tender flesh of a strong neck. It’s nights that are just a little too long, a little too tiring, and the feeling of rubbing your temples to try and disappear a headache you’ve had for months. It’s touches that no longer linger, that are fast and perfunctory, because sex isn’t fun anymore, it’s a chore, and if you can just get off you can roll over and not look at each other. It’s waking up in the middle of the night and padding back to your own room because it’s warmer there, and you can’t stand the cold anymore, it reminds you of home. It’s not eating breakfast together. It’s the thread wearing thinner and thinner until the connection is lost. It’s not cut, it’s not quick, it’s slow and it’s careful and it’s painful, and one day you wake up to an empty bed and walk to an empty table and when you see him in a few hours you  _see_ him, you understand. It ended.


	39. Sphallolalia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Skwisgaar/Pickles. Same meme. Flirtatious talk that leads nowhere.

It starts as a way to piss off Murderface because he nicked Skwisgaar’s best metronome and somehow ended up throwing the thing off the bridge, and Skwisgaar’s best metronome was a relic from Pickles’s Snakes ‘n’ Barrels days, so they both had reason to be pissed off. They plopped down on either side of Murderface on the couch in their shared apartment, leaning in close to him.

“Skwisgaar,” Pickles says. Murderface’s head twitches—he’s staring straight ahead at the television, and if he were to move it, his face would be close to either Skwisgaar or Pickles’s. “How are you, this fine day?”

“Oh, you knows,” Skwisgaar says, and he flips his hair. “Coulds be betters.”

“I bet it could,” Pickles says, whispering the words into Murderface’s ear, as sultry as he can make hiself be.

“Fuck thisch,” Murderface spits, and he stands up and shoves past the both of them. Skwisgaar and Pickles fall back with laughter, clutching their stomach and wiping tears away from their eyes, because it’s entirely too easy.

But: Skwisgaar sits up, puts his hands on his knees, serious. “Onlies de guys dat ams dat far in de closet gets like dat, you know.”

“I know,” Pickles says. “I’ve seen it all, the different type of guys, and Murderface is classic. Great to mess with.”

“You’ds mess with Moidaface?” Skwisgaar pops an eyebrow, and the air starts to buzz, gets a little itchy, uncomfortable.

“Not really my type,” Pickles says, and he looks behind him, where he can see Murderface sitting in the kitchen and eating ice cream out of the carton. “Sort of the opposite, actually.”

Skwisgaar makes a guttural noise of agreement. “You means attractives,” he says.

“Nah,” Pickles says, and he waves his hand. “More like, tall, lean, that shit. Even a little foreign, exotic, you know.”

Skwisgaar nods, and the air is swimming with half-intentions and half-implications. But the conversation folds back onto the metronome and its replacement, and what starts as a prank becomes a game, who can freak Murderface out the most, that extends and spreads far into the future. Nothing is built on the foundation that is laid, but it’s there, and they tread over it, all raised eyebrows and douchebag smirks.


	40. King of the Miniature Horse Show

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Skwisgaar/Toki college brony AU.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i should write a sequel to this in the style of an afa epic tbh

In retrospect, it was all Toki’s fault.

Toki was quite possibly the worst roommate to ever have existed. He seemed to stagnate at the about the mental an emotional age of seven–nine, on a good day–and thus had no knowledge about how to cook, clean, or basically care for himself. He watched television and listened to his music (some days, anime soundtracks; some days Norwegian black metal so heavy Skwisgaar was surprised Satan wasn’t regularly dropping around to have tea with them) far too loud. He never told Skwisgaar when he was having friends over, and Skwisgaar would come home from work at a local music shop to find Toki and five of his likeminded friends crammed on the couch, watching that goddamned miniature horse show.

Until one day, Skwisgaar decided to sit down and watch it with them, and fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. 

It was  _good_.

It moved him to  _tears_.

His favorite was Rarity–he related to her much more than he cared to admit. He couldn’t stand Applejack. Something compelled him to make the pink pony and the blue pony kiss. Soon, Skwisgaar rearranged his work schedule so he’d be able to join Toki and his clan in their biweekly viewing of  _My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic_.

He bought stickers, slapping them onto the back of his Macbook. He found an online forum and started to discuss possible symbolism/sexual subtext in his broken English, which got him kicked off the forum. He and Toki would stay up late in the night, discussing the show themselves over tubs of ice cream and reruns. Skwisgaar gained some weight, forgot to shower, started wearing his hair in a ponytail out of convenience.

It culminated in the viewing of a season finale. Toki had a girlfriend, another fan of the show, that happened to look exactly like Skwisgaar except shorter (still tall for a girl, though–taller than Toki from certain angles) and  _slightly_ curvier. And, well, Skwisgaar might not have showered in three days and his hands smelled a little off from clopping, but he swooped in and stole her from under Toki’s nose. 

He had successfully usurped Toki as King Brony.

He did not question  _why_ Toki’s interest in girls seemed to be “as similar to Skwisgaar as possible,” nor why Toki didn’t seem as upset by the stealing of the girl as the fact that he had lost all of his power and influence. Instead, Skwisgaar started an International Bronies club (fuck those people who made fun of him for English, like,  _seriously_ ) and hoped that it’d look good for jobs after college. He considered switching his major from Music Studies to something else like Communications that could get him inside the very industry that birthed his beautiful favorite show, but he’d already spent so much time and money, and his mother would totally bitch at him if he did that. 


	41. Anglels in Plain Sight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Skwisgaar/Toki preslash Valentine's Day fic.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Du er ikke verdig til dem = "You do not deserve them."

_Toki._

Toki had only ever known of angels in the biblical sense. Multi-faced, winged behemoths, sometimes on fire, warriors and messengers of gods in a heavenly hierarchy. He hadn’t been taught to fear them, but as a child they had invaded his nightmares, floating in and out more like specters than like seraphs, never speaking, leaving trails of flames in their wake. He’d shuddered when his father would read him passages containing angels, had never learned to pray to them for help and solace, only to respect them and stay out of their way. ( _“Du er ikke verdig til dem_. _”_ )

He doesn’t make the connection until after he’s been kicked out of the audition, dejected. He slumps away, a barrage of self-berating slamming into his mind. Like every other thing he has attempted in his life, he has failed at this, at what had felt like his one shot at something good. He had hinged _everything_ on the guitar, had gotten kicked out of the house when he discovered it laying, miraculously, in the hole where he spent the most of the days, had been surviving on the small amount of money he made playing it on the street. This area isn’t good for music, but he doesn’t know where else to go, and this band had seemed perfect. But they rejected him. Of course they rejected him. _Du er ikke verdig til dem_ , he thinks, _du er ikke verdig til dem_.

Until: _he_ calls out to him, opens his arms to him, invites him in. It clicks, then. The images of angels dressed in white with faces delicately handcrafted by God himself. With the lighting, he even looks ablaze in a good way, not in a way that will leave a dangerous path of flames in his stead but instead warm Toki if he were to touch him. Toki understands why people paint angels as beautiful and ethereal, why they decorate church walls and are prayed to, because he wants to drop to his knees and thank every heavenly creature he’s aware of for this beautiful angel in front of him not offering a second chance, but a first.

_Skwisgaar._

Skwisgaar has never cared about angels, nor anything else in Abrahamic religions. His mother had raised him on a blend of atheism and old Nordic myths that suited him just fine, made sense to him. Religion is barely anything to Skwisgaar, something for other people, joining the ranks of ideas such as _love_ and _family_. An angel is something you put on top of a Christmas tree and call somebody who’s been particularly nice to you lately.

So he doesn’t know _why_ that’s the first thing that comes to mind when he sees the kid. Maybe it’s something in the wingspan that appears in his shadow, but that’s more akin to a bird of prey than an angel, and a bird of prey is something that would occur to Skwisgaar first in any other circumstance. Maybe it’s the cherubic innocence illustrated in every aspect of the kid, from his wide eyes to his withdrawn posture. Whatever it is, it shakes Skwisgaar to his core.

It’s only fitting that when the kid begins to play, it sounds heavenly.

Later, after he ushers him into Dethklok and gets to know him, gets to understand that he’s no angel, Skwisgaar asks the rest of the guys if, the first time they’d seen Toki, they had seen the wings in the shadows, too. Skwisgaar is drunk and high off his ass, shoved in the corner of some club with Nathan, Pickles and Murderface while Toki sleeps in their shared bed back at the apartment, ignorant to this excursion. When he asks the question he feels weird, off, like he’s accidentally shared a secret, and the rest of the guys look at him like they’re concerned for his mental health.

“Uh, no,” Nathan says, eyebrows piqued.

The fucking angel theory comes back to Skwisgaar, his brain running over everything he knows about the things. _Guardian angel_ , some old file in his brain is labeled. Skwisgaar pushes it away. Takes another drink of the liquor he’s holding. Pushes back Nathan, Murderface, and Pickles. Heads home, back to Toki. Crawls into bed with him. Doesn’t touch him, but looks at him, at the slope of his nose and the ridge of his cheekbones and all of that. Tucks a piece of his hair away. Thinks. Thinks until he falls asleep. Decides: Toki is far, far more than he seems.


	42. All My Soul Within Me Burning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr Request: Skwisgaar/Toki Skwisgaar-centric between Season 4 and Doomstar and based off of Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven." (Title's from that.)

It’s a Friday night, three weeks after Toki has been taken, and the sadness is settling on Skwisgaar’s shoulders. The melancholy takes the form of a fine powder or dust, light enough to sprinkle but small enough to stick, to prick, and he feels it every time he moves. To remedy this he has taken to laying on his bed, his blanket draped lazily over one of his legs and his arms spread so that the fingers of one hand can drag along the floor in absent patterns. He does not know where the other guys are, what they’re doing. Most likely they’re getting inebriated, letting their minds go elsewhere, but Skwisgaar has not yet found the strength to do so.

It is while lying in the dark like this, the only light the shine of the moon filtering through his window and spilling across the floor in a lazy mess, that he hears a noise. Mordhaus is usually silent this late at night, while the others are out partying, the Klokateers trained in the art of being seen, not heard. Skwisgaar has no energy to move, but something about the soft _thump_ from an indeterminate origin is worrying. He’s reminded, of course, of Toki. Perhaps he’s dead, back to haunt Mordhaus as a ghost, but what Skwisgaar is actually thinking of is him walking around very much alive, before all of this happened. He moves his head just a bit, looking back at the door to his bathroom, hoping to see Toki emerging from it, fresh from a shower, in his plainclothes and ready to take Skwisgaar out.

He’s not there.

Skwisgaar’s head slumps back into place, and he’s just falling asleep, the world slipping in and out of reality, when he hears the noise again. Not once, but several times, a steady knocking sound. It’s enough to pull him up as if by string, a marionette, and he walks to the window.

There’s a fucking bird, pecking against the glass. A behemoth of a raven, black as night and with beady, knowing eyes. Skwisgaar sighs. He has no idea how to open the window in his room, but he wouldn’t anyway. He goes back to bed, worms under the cover and puts the pillow over his head. Maybe he can will the thing away. But because Skwisgaar’s life has not been easy lately, and is not likely to be easy ever again, the thudding sound ceases and almost immediately something starts to peck at the pillow covering his head. Skwisgaar throws the pillow backwards, hoping it’ll kill the bird and wondering how the fuck it got through the window, but this time when he sits up in bed he sees the thing perched on top of his television, his pillow in the opposite corner.

The bird coos a single word: “Wait.”

“What de fucks?” Skwisgaar gets out of bed, walks to the raven. He’s always liked birds, but something in this one’s eyes is warding him off.

“Wait,” the bird coos—or croaks, more accurately—again.

“For whats?” Skwisgaar furrows his brow. He swats at the animal. “Stupids talksingks bird, gets out of my rooms.”

“Wait,” the bird repeats, flatly.

“Waits,” Skwisgaar mocks, drawing the _a_ out and rolling his eyes. “Whatsever, ams goingks to sleep.” He turns around, the back of his throat and behind his eyes burning, and heads for his bed. When he gets there, he sees the bird now nested in his blankets, opening its beak to say the same thing. Skwisgaar kicks at it, and it flutters backward, now hovering in midair.

“Seriouslies,” Skwisgaar sighs, rubbing at the headache that’s forming. “I just wants to sleep. He comes backs if I sleeps.”

“Wait,” the bird urges, jutting his head towards Skwisgaar.

“Fine, I’ll fuckingks waits.”

Skwisgaar folds his legs beneath him on the floor of his room, and he waits.

The bid flutters down to once more nest itself in Skwisgaar’s blankets. Skwisgaar stares at it. It’s larger than average, obsidian feathers and coal eyes, like the manifestation of night itself. It speaks only when spoken to. It seems wise, eternal, ethereal. Skwisgaar’s always been a fan of birds, and under different circumstances this one would be no exception, but Skwisgaar’s too preoccupied with images of Toki in his head. It’s like, if he closes his eyes and opens them fast enough, his memories blur with reality, and he sees Toki instead of that bird on the bed, sitting shirtless with his hair swept over one side and his scars exposed and waiting for Skwisgaar to come and kiss them better. Or he’s sprawled out, watching Skwisgaar play, adoration adorning every feature of his face, kicking his feet in midair. Or he’s in Skwisgaar lap, pressing down into him, touching him, and—

“Wait,” the bird crows as the sun rises.

“You can reads minds?” Skwisgaar is not surprised at this news.

The bird ruffles its feather, almost shrugging.

Skwisgaar has fallen asleep by the time the sun has fully risen. He wakes up on the floor as if from a bad hangover, the headache about to cleave his brain into halves, and the bird gone. He searches his room for it, throws the mattress over and everything, but there’s no trace of the bird anyway. He surmises that it must have been a dream born of his depression and leaves his bedroom. He finds the other guys and is handed a meth pipe. He takes up the art of waiting.


	43. Last Period Music Class

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr Request: Teacher!Skwisgaar/Student!Toki. AU. Warning for adult/minor sexual content.

There were problem students and there were model students. While Skwisgaar had been in school, he had been a problem student, barely showing up for class and being quite disruptive when he actually did. When he became a teacher, driven by the passion to communicate the love of music to the next generation, he learned to hate those of his ilk, but he never shook the connection he shared for them. He punished them, but he felt _bad_ about it, some nostalgic part of him wanting to join in on their fun.

He had three notable problem students in his class: Nathan Explosion, a boy whose preferred name was Pickles, and William Murderface. They all slung their beat-up leather jackets over the back of their chairs and propped their combat boots up on their desks, eyes ringed red, smoking cigarettes openly, swearing and spitting. Skwisgaar hated them for their disobedience, but knew that he would have slotted himself right in with them when he was in high school, and whenever he was forced to raise his voice at them he would feel a thrum in his heartstrings that reminded him his time in high school was dead, never to be returned to.

Nathan, Pickles, and Murderface had a fourth friend, their total opposite, a perfect model student. A stocky kid with a mousy personality, Toki Wartooth turned everything in on time, took diligent notes and ignored his friends’ disruption. Skwisgaar learned in the first few weeks that Toki did not like to be called on, turning red and stammering through a (correct) answer, and showed all the signs of _problems at home_ that Skwisgaar had learned about in training. Something about him made Skwisgaar’s heart hurt.

Skwisgaar’s class was the last of the day. The bell snuck up on them one particular Friday, everybody in the class having been involved in practicing at the keyboards along the back wall. The students scrambled to pack up and rush out the door, but Toki took his time, organizing his things neatly. He was the last one in the class, and something made Skwisgaar walk up to him, put a hand on his shoulder, say, “Toki.”

“Mr. Skwigelf?” Toki turned around, doe-eyed and rosy-cheeked, one strap of his backpack over his shoulder, his hair parted unevenly, and Skwisgaar melted.

“I, uh.” Skwisgaar cleared his throat. “I want to talk to you about…things.”

“Things?” Toki asked. Skwisgaar took his hands off his shoulder, as if he’d just become cognizant of its position.

“Yes. Things.” Toki’s stare unnerved him, and Skwisgaar felt himself start to sweat underneath his collar. “Your friends, really. I think they’re a bad influence.”

"Oh!” Toki’s face lit up; Skwisgaar’s knees went weak. He’d always, _always_ , had a thing for the ignorant, the innocent, the young men in the twilight of virility. “You mean Nathan, Pickles, and Murderface.” He cocked his head. “I don’t think they’re a bad influence. They’re really good friends.”

"They’re disruptive, and you’re such a good student, I’d hate to see you slip, Toki.” Toki wasn’t going to slip. That was obvious. Skwisgaar had had him in class for six months, he was a straight-A student with a killer work ethic. A teacher’s dream.

“Well—they’re my favorite thing about school,” Toki said. He broke eye contact and looked down, at his shoes, let the strap of his backpack slide off his shoulder. “Sometimes they’re the only things I like—about school, that is. And this class, of course.” His eyes flickered back up, and Skwisgaar felt struck by lightning.

"You’re just saying that to get on my good side,” Skwisgaar scoffed.

“Maybe.” Toki smiled.

Skwisgaar couldn’t help it. He didn’t mean for it to happen, really. He had just wanted to get to know the kid—be a mentor, maybe, maybe call child services on his parents, because he could just see the beginning of a bruise where the sleeve of Toki’s shirt brushed against his bicep. It wasn’t his intention, but he swooped down, pressed his lips to Toki’s.

He expected Toki to jump back, hit his desk, yell at him in outrage and disgust.

He did not expect Toki to wrap his arms around his neck and pull him closer.


	44. The Quiet Things that No One Ever Knows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr Request: Long distance Skwisgaar/Toki. AU.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title from brand new's song of the same name. has nothing to do with the fic, though. it's just a good title.

They meet while Skwisgaar is taking a cross-continent road trip with some of his friends in the weeks before he’s to leave for America. The idea came to them a month ago: start in Sweden, go through Norway, swing back around and go through Sweden to Finland, down through the East, crawl back along and loop back up again in time for Skwisgaar’s flight. It’s their farewell present for Skwisgaar, and something he’d always dreamed of doing but had never had the time, money, nor effort.

So: it’s the first day of the trip, and coming from Stockholm to Oslo takes about six hours. They stop in Oslo for lunch and to stretch their tired legs, but by the time they get to Lillehammer they’re inexplicably hungry and sore once more. Skwisgaar will, later, chalk it up to an act of fate that they pause in this city, that they go to _this_ restaurant for a mid-afternoon bite to eat, because inside he finds Toki Wartooth.

He doesn’t know that at first glance, obviously. All he sees is a guy maybe three years younger than Skwisgaar himself, sitting alone at a table, bundled up in an oversized navy hoodie and stirring a small spoon in the drink in front of him. He has his legs crossed not like a woman, but like somebody who wants to take up as least space as possible, and he’s wearing shorts and galoshes like a kid. This prompts Skwisgaar, always the overconfident and obnoxious, to go and prod at the kid, jeer at him.

The divine face that raises up to receive his remarks catches him completely off guard.

By the end of their time in Oslo, short as it may be, he’s begging the rest of his friends to let Toki come with them, but there’s not enough room in the car and he’s known Toki for maybe forty-five minutes. Still, Skwisgaar scrawls every way of contacting him—phone number, email, home address, he’d convert his soul to numbers and key it into the concrete of the sidewalk if he had to—on a napkin and puts it in Toki’s front pocket himself. Toki nods, accepts, and it’s all very dramatic, all Skwisgaar can think about as they navigate through Europe over the course of the next two weeks. Checking his phone for texts, emails, a sign from the gods, and he gets nothing.

“Crazy,” says Acke, smoking a cigarette and leaning against the car while Elof refills it in Czechoslovakia. “Stop thinking about him, Jesus Christ, Skwisgaar.” He drops the cigarette to the ground and crushes it underneath his boot, and that is that.

It’s not until Skwisgaar’s three months into the American dream, sleeping on the couch of Ingolf’s American cousin, James, that Skwisgaar is contacted by Toki. It’s in the form of a Skype call, the noise pulling Skwisgaar out of the nap he’d fallen into while working on a song on his laptop. Skwisgaar doesn’t recognize the username, but he just _knows_ it’s Toki.

And it is. The quality is shit on Toki’s end and the lighting is terrible, completely dark except for what’s coming from his screen and lighting his face up. It might be a trick of the light, but his features look sunken, and there’s a bruise on his right cheek. Nonetheless, when their eyes meet through the screen, Skwisgaar feels something jumpstart in his heart.

“Hey,” Toki says, and with that one word, _hey_ , they fall into a pattern.

Toki always contacts Skwisgaar first. The lighting in his Skype is always shit. Skwisgaar Google translates what little Norwegian he doesn’t understand from Toki’s texts. The time difference doesn’t even matter because Skwisgaar barely sleeps. And in a few more months Skwisgaar has his own apartment and he and Toki are regularly undressing for each other, dragging their own hands along their bodies as if they were the other’s, exchanging whispered _I love you’s_ that makes Skwisgaar’s palms sweat.

But there’s complications.

Skwisgaar had started to expect, and in a four-hour Skype session learns, of Toki’s situation. He’s talking to him via smuggled items that he hides in increasingly creative and contrived ways, and if they are to be found out about, the consequences could be disastrous. Then, of course, there’s the thing that they don’t talk about—Skwisgaar’s sleeping with other people, people that he can touch, people that he doesn’t actually love. That’s how he convinces himself that it’s okay: he doesn’t love them. He loves Toki, he does, and conversations with him are the best thing in his life at the moment.

Then, in February, a week goes by without any communication whatsoever, a week that includes Valentine’s Day, a week that has Skwisgaar checking Norwegian news sites and looking for a headline like _Village boy proclaimed dead after tragic accident_.

On the eighth day he gets a Skype call from Toki. For the first time, he’s sitting in a properly lighted room. Skwisgaar can see faint bruises on his jaw, a fading black eye, a scabbed lip split at the curve. Toki is not smiling.

“What happened?” Skwisgaar sinks into himself, chin in hands on arms with elbows on the desk, with relief, with dread, with placation.

“They found out.” Toki smiles flickers like a light in a horror movie. “The router, everything. They found it all. They killed it.”

“But not you.”

“But not me.” Toki’s mouth is fixed into a smile. The rest of his face is not.

It’s a short conversation. Toki is rooming at a house for boys like him, boys now without their broken homes. Skwisgaar tells him how to contact Acke, Elof, Ingolf, Caj, all of the old gang. Toki does not lose that ghoulish smile, and when Skwisgaar cuts the conversation so Toki can go to bed, his elbows slip from the desk, his head hits it, and he stays there.

It’s funny. A relationship such as theirs carries certain inconveniences anyway, obvious ones, like how you can’t touch them, feel them, kiss them, talk to them, in real time, where they are constant, where a faulty connection or glitch can’t take them from you. Then there are the situational ones, the ones specific to Skwisgaar and Toki themselves, and the total weight of Toki’s problems crash down on Skwisgaar. Hit his spine so hard it shatters, sends shards throughout his body, deep and physical pain and despair. Skwisgaar wants to help, but he _can’t_ , can’t be there as any greater of a presence than a name, a voice, a face on a screen. 


	45. Druxy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Word meme. Something which looks good on the outside, but is actually rotten inside. Magnus/Toki.

Toki goes to camp to make friends, and Toki thinks that he’s found a friend in Magnus Hammersmith. He has that older, fatherly thing that has always attracted Toki out of some Freudian theories long since debunked, just arrogant enough to make Toki sometimes roll his eyes but otherwise trap him. He meets Magnus and he sees how he would have fit so effortlessly and easily into Dethklok before Toki, and it’s kind of interesting to hang out with your replacement, compare yourselves.

It’s not long before Toki develops an unsurprising crush. As with unattainable crushes of years before, Toki vents his feelings by talking to his Deddy bear and drawing fanciful crayon illustrations of him and Magnus frolicking through fields of flowers. Magnus is indulgent, taking Toki to ice cream shoppes and fairs, buying him things and winning him prizes. Some part of Toki knows it’s ridiculous, maybe even self-destructive, but it’s been so long since he’s had a proper buddy that wasn’t addicted to cocaine and dubious at best, and their friendship was one forged in the fire of fear and the need for protection.

There are seeds and signs of Magnus’s betrayal and evil. Toki does not see them—he is blinded by his own gullibility and Magnus’s decent deception abilities.

And even when he’s chained to a spiderweb, half-starved and pain a constant burn in his side, Abigail crying quietly as to not disturb him to his left, the sound of blood loud in his ears, he does not see the evil. Don’t hurt me, friend, he says to Magnus, and Magnus laughs, kicks him in his stitches like a dog.

 


	46. Gymnophoria & Apodyopis

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Word meme. Skwisgaar/Toki. Mentally undressing someone/feeling someone mentally undressing you.

For his seventeenth birthday, which comes about three months after he joins Dethklok, Skwisgaar decides to get Toki drunk good and proper. The irony is that neither of them legal, Skwisgaar having a stretch of time to go before he turns twenty-one and Toki now four years under. Still, Skwisgaar has a good fake ID for the times he gets carded at all, and he splurges on some middle-shelf liquor for the occasion.

They have the apartment to themselves. Pickles and Nathan are meeting with the record company about something or the other and Murderface is out of town on a family vacation that he’s been bitching about for weeks. So, Skwisgaar comes home with a brown paper bag and plops on the couch beside Toki, taking the remote from him and turning off the cartoons he was watching. Toki’s about to complain, Skwisgaar can see that in the certain way he opens his mouth and his eyebrows pinch, but Skwisgaar slaps his hand against his lips, shows him the bottle. Toki’s muscles relax. Skwisgaar thinks he reads excitement in the place of anger.

“Seriously?” Toki whispers. When they’re alone, they talk Norwegian and Swedish. It annoys the others, but it keeps their languages fresh, and has the side effect of somehow increasing their bond. It’s useful to pull out in public, share private thoughts.

“Yeah.” Skwisgaar pulls the bottle from the bag, pops the cap, takes a drink. “It’s good. Try it.”

He holds the bottle to Toki’s mouth like a mother would to a baby, his hand on the base of Toki’s skull, fingers threaded into hair. Toki drinks as if he’s dying of thirst. Skwisgaar knows the feeling—his eyes sweep up and down Toki’s body, and if it wasn’t for the way that Toki has filled out after three months of regular bathing and proper food, he’d feel sort of creepy. But Toki looks a man at seventeen, his voice is low and his hands are strong, and Skwisgaar’s mouth is going dry.

(Toki’s aware he’s being watched. He tilts his head back, bares his Adam’s apple, an unspoken invitation that he’s not yet sent.)

Between the two of them, they make their way through the entire bottle. They share a room, but by the early morning they’re too drunk to even consider moving the short distance from the couch to their bed, falling asleep in a mess of limbs and hair and fingers close enough to touch but not to hold.

They don’t do anything.

Not yet.


	47. Gargalesthesia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Word meme. The sensation caused by tickling. Skwisgaar/Toki.

Totally unsurprisingly, Toki was ticklish.

Surprisingly, Skwisgaar was even more so.

It started before _they_ started. While sitting on a couch in old Mordhaus, Skwisgaar had leaned over Toki to grab something, and when he came back he’d dragged his hair across Toki’s bare shoulders. Toki bleated out involuntary laughter, skin flushing red.

“You’re _ticklish_?” Skwisgaar asked, so shocked and delighted by this news that he reverted to Swedish.

"Is that really so shocking?” Toki glared at him, switching from overjoyed to territorial in a second. He did that a lot around Skwisgaar.

“No, it’s great.” And Skwisgaar attacked Toki, eventually getting him to cry from laughter.

Toki, in turn, retaliated. It pissed Skwisgaar off to discover, but just a simple skimming of Toki’s fingers over the skin in the crook of his elbow or around his belly button would force giggles from his mouth, and Toki used that to his full advantage. He’d lean over in the middle of practice, or a meeting with the record, anything, and run his fingers in any of Skwisgaar’s ticklish spots.

It was homoerotic to begin with, something the other guys ragged on them about for no end, so it was no surprise when one of these fights turned into full blown sex. Honestly, it just made it all that much better.

 


	48. Baisemain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Word meme. A kiss on the hand. Skwisgaar/Toki.

A low whining sound causes Skwisgaar to look up from his book. Toki’s been practicing guitar for hours now, and while Skwisgaar had been helping him in the beginning, he tired fast. Now he’s laying in bed in their shared room, catching up on some reading he’s been meaning to, the sound of Toki practicing just white noise in the background. But this disruption disturbs him.

“What is it?” When they’re alone, they use their own languages. Toki dislikes using English. Skwisgaar sympathizes.

“I hurt my hand,” Toki says. He lifts his left hand up, and Skwisgaar see thats his fingers are bleeding. “I used to have calluses but I guess they went away.”

“Oh.” Skwisgaar casts aside the blankets and stands up, walks to Toki. He takes his hand in both of his. “Let me see.”

“What are you going to do?” Toki half-flinches, then leans in closer to Skwisgaar. His eyebrows knit up, then relax.

“This.” Skwisgaar brings Toki’s fingertips to his lips, kisses them. Toki repeats his previous actions, the tensing, then just stares at Skwisgaar, wide-eyed.

Skwisgaar smirks.


	49. A Beginner's Guide to Destroying the Moon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The apocalypse. Gen with shades of Skwisgaar/Toki.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> title from the foster the people song of the same name

On the day the world ends, Dethklok has a barbecue. It’s just the eight of them: Charles, still in his robes and sitting with his eyes hooded; Abigail, twisting her wedding ring around her finger and biting her lip; Knubbler, flitting around and holding a fruity drink in his hand; Nathan, standing behind Charles and looking towards the sky; Pickles, sitting on the grass and tying a band around his arm; Skwisgaar, lounging in a lawn chair and holding Toki’s hand; Toki, lounging in an lawn chair and holding Skwisgaar’s hand; Murderface, sitting on top of the picnic table with his knees to his chest and his arms wrapped around them. The sky is a deep red, no clouds to be found, and both sun and moon sit ablaze near the center.

“It’s an astronomical impossibility,” Knubbler’s telling Abigail.

Abigail looks up. “I know. Everybody knows that.”

They have already eaten every delicacy known to barbecues, even apple pie for dessert. Now they sit, suspended. The world is going to end in about half an hour by Charles’s estimate. All day the moon and sun have been rising in conjunction, and now they are almost at the crux, the climax.

Pickles presses the needle into his arm, finds a vein. He closes his eyes, sighs. “That’s the good shit. I’ve had this for fuckin’ ever. I knew I had to save it.”

They have been working for this for years. The apocalypse, the end of this world, or at least that’s what Charles says. All literature points to their ascension as gods, at least the members of Dethklok. The mortals are another matter. The sun and the moon inch closer to each other.

Murderface says nothing. He lowers his head so that his cheek rests against his kneecap. Looking at the sky makes him feel dizzy, so he looks off at Mordhaus’s grounds.

What is going to happen is that the sun and the moon will collide and, somehow, suck Earth into their summed mass at a high speed. All the experts say it will be painless, but for all the similarities they sometimes may share, science and religion make malevolent bedmates. A month ago, experts would have predicted their current hypothesis as beyond even the thinnest outskirts of the realm of possibility.

“I’m scared.” Toki turns to Skwisgaar, speaking in Norwegian.

Skwisgaar doesn’t respond, only squeezes Toki’s hand.            

Minutes of silence build upon more minutes of silence. Early that morning they had been talking, laughing, touching, throwing a proper end of the world party. The mood has grown heavier the closer the sun and moon have arced towards each other, and now—now they have nothing left to say.

A minute, maybe a minute and a half left, now. The space between the sun and moon is impossible to determine, blinding to look at.

“Are you sure about this?” Nathan asks Charles, looking down at him. The first words he’s said in hours.

Charles tenses, his hands on his knees and his mouth pressing into a hard line. “Let’s put it this way,” he says through gritted teeth. “I can’t afford not to be sure.”

Abigail bites through her lip so it begins to bleed, her fingers stilling on her wedding ring.

Knubbler throws back the rest of his drink.

Skwisgaar and Toki hold on to each other’s hands so tight the little bones begin to splinter.

Pickle’s eyes roll into the back of his head.

Murderface coils into himself.

Charles relaxes.

Nathan watches as the sun and the moon collide.

Earth begins to accelerate.


	50. A Building and a Snow Storm as an Opaque Metaphor for a Crumbling Relationship

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Self-evident. Skwisgaar/Toki.

The snow has been falling for days. It piles up against the door and blocks them from the outside world. Their phones have been rendered useless by the blizzard. They are trapped, dumping homesick and stir-crazy bodies into rickety wooden furniture, wondering why they are here in the first place.

“Maybe if we try hard enough, we can open the door,” Skwisgaar suggests. They are away from the others, away from English, and they have resorted to their mother tongues. They share the thought (though neither have voiced it) that if they were truly left alone, they might regress completely.

“It’s useless,” Toki says, speaking from the other side of the cabin. Where Skwisgaar sits at the table in the kitchen, combing over the newspaper from last week and stirring his third cup of coffee, now cold, Toki is on the couch, his knees curled up to his chest. He’s looking out the window, watching the storm outside and feeling small. “We already tried that, when there was less snow, and now there’s more. What the fuck makes you think it would work now?”

“There’s no need to curse, Toki.” Skwisgaar folds the newspaper and stills his hand. Something about this is so father-like (and, by extension, so fucked up) that Toki flinches when he comes to the couch, tries to wrap an arm around him. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Toki answers. He draws Skwisgaar’s leather jacket around him. There is heating in the cabin, but he’s so cold.

"God, you’re impossible.” Skwisgaar gets up and goes into the bedroom. Toki does not follow him.

\Maybe it’s the snow, or maybe that it’s when they tried to go skiing one of Toki’s ski poles snapped in half, or maybe it was that when they went out to eat Skwisgaar didn’t like the food. Whatever it is, they’ve been sleeping without touching each other, snapping back and forth, shooting glares when they think the other isn’t looking. And as the wind shakes the foundation of the house, as the heating rattles and as Toki counts the snowflakes that drop from the gray sky, he thinks of home. Not his current home—his first home, the hole in the ground where he spent his childhood chained up and fighting just to grow, a flower out of the sunlight.

Skwisgaar doesn’t know any of that.

So when it stops snowing for a small amount of time and they manage to break the front door to the cabin open, and they stand in the clearing just glad to be outside, and it starts to snow again, Toki still in Skwisgaar’s leather jacket and Skwisgaar wearing Toki’s fair isle cardigan, Toki knows. He stands with his head down, snowflakes sticking in his hair, Skwisgaar just off to the side, and he knows.


	51. Help Me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Skwisgaar/Toki Prison AU Ficlet. Lots of trigger warnings here.

Toki Wartooth looks pretty in a jumpsuit.

He wears it as he’s supposed to. He does not tie it around his waist and expose the undershirt. He does not wear his pants low on his hips. He sits like a choirboy, with his hands folded in his lap, and he chews on the inside of his cheek. His hair is combed neatly over his shoulders. There are circles underneath his eyes, but his skin is tan, taut, muscles lurking beneath the bagginess of the jumpsuit. For the most part, the other inmates leave him alone. He’s in there for murder—he’s serving a long sentence. He looks like a choirboy, but there’s something off about him, like his shadow says _don’t fuck with me_.

Skwisgaar’s a prison guard. Been working here for five years. He’s not like the others—he’s never taken joy in beating the prisoners, he doesn’t get off on the power trip, like Murderface, who is feared among all despite his ridiculous lisp. No, the prisoners _love_ Skwisgaar, they always hope they’ll be overseen by him. But Toki—Toki doesn’t join in on the jovial jeering. Toki keeps his head down. Skwisgaar prods him in the back, tries to get him to look at him.

That goes on for weeks. And when Toki does look at him, it’s like a fucking electric shock, like Skwisgaar died for a second. And he wants—he wants to bend down and kiss him. (Nothing’s stopping him, he realizes—he’s the authority here. But the best part of him restrains himself, the part that doesn’t want to get found out and fired.)

“Hi,” Toki whispers. He’s meek. He’s sporting a bruise on his right cheek. Maybe his shadow’s gone mute.

“Hi,” Skwisgaar whispers back, shocked by the smallness of his voice.

Skwisgaar starts to walk beside Toki. Starts to learn things about him. He killed two guys in a bar fight, accidentally, he says, while he was out with friends. His only friends—he doesn’t have a lot of them. He likes to watch kid’s cartoons. Doesn’t like to drink but does it anyway. And eventually Skwisgaar learns about the scars that coat Toki’s back, why he never sheds the jumpsuit, why he sits like a good choirboy with his hands folded in his lap and his hair combed neatly over his shoulders.

Skwisgaar locks in him in his cell, one day. His cellmate’s a burly guy, Nathan, on a grand theft auto and possession sentence. He’s already snoring in his bed, and Skwisgaar’s been kind of worried that he’s made Toki his bitch. He’s about to turn away for the night when Toki grabs Skwisgaar through the bars—grabs his hands, entangles their fingers, and holds them there.

“Help me,” Toki whispers.

Skwisgaar has no idea what he means. But he whispers back: “Okay.”

When they kiss for the first time, it’s when Skwisgaar’s escorting Toki to the showers, and it’s _Toki_ that initiates it. Quick, on his tip-toes. Skwisgaar is sold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> if i were to make this, like, an actual thing, a lot of it would be how the authority is subverted and toki’s in control. toki tops, it explores sub/dom dynamics. charles would be toki’s lawyer, and he’s trying to negotiate a lesser sentence for him. murderface is, like, the classic mean prison guard antagonist. the nathan/toki cellmate relationship would be explored, and the basic plot would be establishment of skwistok –> charles negotiating sentence –> what toki means by “help me” is probably “help me feel better, help me escape, help me be normal.” title would probably, thus, be “Help Me.” probably a short chaptered thing. but i don’t know how i would end it because i already did the escape-the-law thing in woodpeckers, and i would hate to repeat plotlines, but every other ending is so bleak, blah.


	52. Clipped Wings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tumblr Request: Skwisgaar is 13 and breaks both his arms. Gen. Canon compliant.

It happens at school. Skwisgaar’s walking with his books held to his chest like a girl, angry and flustered over something his classmate had said about his mother. At thirteen, these jokes are king, and Skwisgaar has seen the before, during and after of the reality, so he has no taste for them. He’s feeling too hot in the face to see the step in front of him and misses it, tumbling down, the books in his arms somehow crushing both of them by the time he gets to the bottom. If he had been sort of kind of trying not to cry before, now he’s sobbing, pain in his back and his forearms, pages of his books torn, kids and adults alike gathering around him. He blacks out.

He wakes up a few minutes later, supported by the head of the school as he leads Skwisgaar to the office. Skwisgaar tries to swat him away, but moving his arms hurt, and he whimpers involuntarily. “We’re going to call your mom,” the guy says, and Skwisgaar finds he can shake his head no problem.

“She’s at work,” he says. She would have just started her shift, and would be so annoyed to hear from Skwisgaar.

“You’re pretty banged up. You need to go to a hospital.” On some level, Skwisgaar realizes this, but he’s reluctant to admit it.

What happens in the end is that they call his mother anyway, and she’s not annoyed to hear from Skwisgaar, she’s worried. That’s arguably worse, and Skwisgaar only wishes he could cross his arms over his chest as somebody finds his torn-up books and hands them to Serveta. She drives Skwisgaar to the doctor’s and makes worried noise over him, which he ignores, still wishing he could cross his arms as he stares out the window and watches the city roll by. The snow is half-melted, a little gray and worn, in the part of spring that’s disgusting. At the doctor’s they diagnose him with two broken arms and a bruised tailbone, wrapping his arms in casts and ruffling his hair. He can’t cross his arms like he wants still, can’t move them, and the doctors tell him that for the next few weeks at least he’s going to have to be reliant on others.

This is the worst thing Skwisgaar has ever heard.

Even worse is when he gets home and sulks into his room, slamming the door to shut out his calling, concerned mother. He sees his guitar in all its glory, positioned so the light from the window can hit it every morning and make him want to face the day, and he’s crying again. He realizes he won’t be able to play it for a long, long time. _Fuck_. He can’t even press his fingers to his eyes and stamp out his tears, so instead he lays on his bed, still in his clothes with his boots sodden with melting snow, and he sleeps and sleeps and sleeps.

This time when he wakes up it’s his mother cradling his head. She’s pulled a chair to his bedside and is running her fingers through his hair. It’s dark outside. There’s a tray in her lap, which he discerns is hot soup, the smell enticing but unwelcome.   

“Why aren’t you at work?” he sneers, jerking his head away from her hands. His tailbone hurts from where he’s been sleeping on it. He can’t win.

 “They gave me time off to care for you,” she says, softly, _motherly_. Where’s this attitude when she’s fucking three guys at once in the living room, he wonders.

He doesn’t voice his distaste. Instead: “What’s that in your lap?”

“Soup,” she says. “I’m going to have to feed it to you, Skwisgaar, I’m sorry. I know it must be rough for a young man like yourself to be like a baby again.”

He wants to yell and scream and insist he can somehow feed himself, bathe himself, clothe himself, and most of all, play the guitar that’s leering at him from the opposite side of the room. Hot, angry tears prick his eyes, and there’s nothing he can do but sit up and allow his mother to feed him spoonfuls of soup, hot and thick as it slides down his throat. Comfort food, he thinks, flashes of childhood sickness and similar situations coming to him waves. He pushes them back. He lets his mother quell the hunger in his stomach and decides that he will only resort to this when he is absolutely desperate.

They find ways to work around it. He takes off school for a while to get adjusted. He tends to spend his days watching television, a large glass of water with a long, spiraling straw ever-present on the table beside the couch. His mother bathes him in the evenings. He finds he is able to urinate by himself. He thinks he could masturbate, somehow, but there’d be no way to clean up, so that’s out of the picture. The guitar is unworkable. It’s the most miserable time of Skwisgaar’s life.

He can tell his mother tries to grow closer to him, but he pushes her away. The embarrassment is reason enough—he feels like an invalid, as he is technically, temporarily one, and her face is a reminder of his own failure. It’s her fault he’s in this mess in the first place, the fact that she’s a filthy, vile _whore_ , that the other kids have become attuned to this, that he has to be so _emotional_ about it. He remains tight-lipped around her, and when the ability comes back, he approximates the gesture of crossing his arms the best he can.

After three weeks have gone by, he heals enough that his arms become somewhat functional. He can return to school. His mother can return to work; he is no longer reliant on her for both things. The first thing he does when he thinks he can manage it is sit on his bed and take his guitar into his lap. He can’t play it, but holding it there, feeling its weight on his thighs and its back against his chest, is enough. He drops his head to it. Runs a finger down the strings just to feel it vibrate. He is reminded of his mother holding him, but this is infinitely better, he decides.


	53. Before the Damage is Done

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Writing meme prompt: "I’m sick of being USELESS." Skwisgaar/Toki. Warnings for: post-traumatic stress disorder, nightmares, mentions of abuse and prescription drugs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> previously untitled so the title's from the suburbs by mr. little jeans. you could use this fic as a song recommendations list at this point!

Nightmares are not a regular occurrence for Toki. When he sleeps, it is heavy and dark, and the only time he dreams it’s like of that of a child’s before they develop abstract thinking—static sensory images. He’ll smell cookies in an oven, see a photograph that doesn’t exist but his mind has conjured up, feel something slimy all over his body. For the most part he does not stir when he sleeps, staying still the whole night, feeling rested and refreshed after waking up.

When he does have nightmares, they’re bad. He’ll stir as they crescendo into something truly terrible—as the monster chases him, as he opens his mouth to scream and finds his voice is not working, as hands close around his neck—and bolt upright at the climax, in a cold sweat, chest heaving, sheets curled so hard in his hands he’s going to rip them. It takes hours to calm down, to shake the feelings off, to _breathe_ again. Klokateers used to flock to him, the fleshy ones that smell like lavender and whose sole jobs are to hold the band members when they sob at night, but they could not soothe him no matter how hard they stroked his hair and rubbed his back. Still, they came.

When Toki moves into Skwisgaar’s room, he finds that Skwisgaar is a light sleeper and wakes with him during a nightmare. Toki recoils from him every time he tries to touch him—Skwisgaar’s cold, rough, pale hands look and feel like death, only heightening Toki’s fears. Toki drops his head between his legs and shakes. Skwisgaar knows better than to touch him. Instead, Skwisgaar falls back to bed and goes back to sleep while Toki squeezes tears of fear and self-loathing between his eyes.

The nightmares replace the child’s dreams after the fiasco with Magnus and getting kidnapped. When Toki is healed and out of the hospital, he’s given pills for them, but they have to wean him off eventually. When the weaning begins months later Toki’s wailing every night, dreaming of the cell, the spider web, the feeling of alcohol poured into a fresh wound. Skwisgaar still wakes. Skwisgaar sits beside Toki, pale and glowing like a ghost of a happier past, staring at Toki, and Toki knows he’s willing Toki to get better but Toki just _can’t_.

It’s hard for Skwisgaar. Toki knows that. It’s hard for Toki to see the stress that his stress causes him—Skwisgaar’s hair has thinned, his mouth has thinned, everything has thinned. But still, it fucking hurts when, in the morning, both of them sleep-deprived and red around the eyes, Skwisgaar spits “Ams sick of feelings useless.”

“Whats do you means?” Toki pretends not to know. He yawns and raises his arms above his head. His back crackles and pops, tired from being in the position it was last night while he cried.

“De nightsmares.  I can’ts handles dem, Tokis, and neithers cans you. Maybes you shoulds talk to the doctor abouts it and gets back on de medicine.”

“I wants to recover, Skwisgaar,” Toki says, narrowing his eyes. But still, the reminder that he has to _recover_ makes his muscles clam up, his back screaming in agony.

 “Dis amns’t recovery, Toki,” Skwisgaar says, softly, cradling Toki’s face. In this moment his hand doesn’t feel like death. In this moment Toki can nuzzle Skwisgaar’s hand. In this moment Toki can admit defeat. But only in this moment.

So he asks for the medicine again and they adjust his dose. The nightmares turn from every day to a few times a week. It’s more manageable.

So Skwisgaar finds that if he strums his guitar and hums for Toki, happy and warm Scandinavian folk songs, Toki calms down, some. He finds that Toki does not like touch but likes auditory stimulation as long as it is quiet and comforting. They buy a CD that plays various sounds of nature, helping Toki sleep easier and calm down, at the suggestion of his therapist. (Skwisgaar likes it too, especially the gentle chirps of birds, but doesn’t say so. He does, however, defend Toki when the other guys find out and declare it not metal enough.)

So Toki starts to recover.

 


	54. Mamihlapinatapei

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Word meme. The look between two people in which each loves the other but is too afraid to make the first move. Skwisgaar/Toki.

There was a name for that look.

The look they’d give each other in the middle of a shared laugh. The look they’d give each other in the middle of a shared fight. The look they’d give each other for no reason.

The look that twisted Skwisgaar’s face into something of confusion. His bottom eyelids would raise up. His eyebrows would draw in. His forehead would crinkle. His lips would purse. His head would tilt. He couldn’t quite make it out. It confused him. This feeling, communicated into that look.

The look that softened Toki’s face into something of desolation. His eyes would drop His eyebrows would drop. His forehead would sfoten. His lips would droop. His head would fall. He knew what it was. It saddened him. This feeling, communicated into that look.

There was a name for that look. Pickles found it browsing online, and when he saw it, he wanted to print it out and paste it all over the walls of Mordhaus until the two idiots got the hint: _there was a name for that look._

Mamihlapinatapei.


	55. Red, White and Blue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Skwisgaar/Toki Fourth of July bloodplay porn.

“I haves a weird requests.”

It’s the early days of Dethklok, when they still have friends and they’re still located largely in America, so they’re at a barbecue for the Fourth of July. Toki’s taking a seat across from Skwisgaar in the plastic chairs half-shaded by tacky umbrellas by the pool, looking nervous. His hair is braided in two short frizzy pigtails over his shoulders, muscled thighs exposed in short shorts like a girl and sticking together with the heat. Skwisgaar and Toki have started sleeping together a few months ago; Skwisgaar’s feeling parched, watching the drops of sweat slide down the crevices of Toki’s legs, so he says “Yeah?” and relaxes into the plastic bench he’s sitting on. He spreads his legs, relaxes his wrists, eyes half-lidded.

 “Okays. Wells.” Toki bites into his bottom lip. “I thinks you’lls likes it because it ams kind of means to dis country.” Then he’s quiet, his teeth digging into his lip and his eyes widening.

Skwisgaar sighs. “Gets on with it.”

“I was inspireds by red, white, and blue—”

“Ams dis an arts piece?”

“Shuts up and lets me talk!” Toki exclaims, leaning forward, his body loosening. Skwisgaar smiles in what will be received by Toki as smug, but what is in reality satisfied. “Okays, fines, I wants to draw bloods from you and den fuck. Because, you knows, red—blood, white—you, blue—your eyes.”

“Ohs,” Skwisgaar says. His eyebrows perk and his lips part just the slightest. “Wells. Sures. Comes on, let’s goes.”

“Really? Dat’s it?“ But Toki’s already rising to his feet, letting out a breath so heavy his chest visibly heaves. His top flutters against his abdomen, exposes his v-line. Skwisgaar nods and grabs him by the hand, leads him into the house of the guy hosting the barbecue. They pass through the kitchen and Toki grabs a pair of scissors and a few butter knifes, sticking them into the back pocket of his shorts, and Skwisgaar doesn’t know how to feel or what to do about that except placing a hand on Toki’s ass and running a thumb over the blade of the butter knife, just lightly.

They run up the stairs squealing like school girls—Toki’s still young enough to be excited by illicit activities and it’s infectious, even if Skwisgaar won’t admit it. They open doors without closing them, stuffing giggles back into their mouths with their fists, until they find an empty bedroom. Toki leads Skwisgaar inside with a hand wrapped around his wrist and his head tilted; Skwisgaar slams the door shut behind him using only the toe of his shoe.

Skwisgaar grabs Toki up in his arm and kisses him. Toki lets it happen for a few seconds before pushing Skwisgaar off and reaching into his back pocket, jangling the scissors and knives in front of Skwisgaar, reminding him why they’re here with a lewd expression on his face. That’s enough for Skwisgaar to get hard, just to see Toki like this, just to know what’s about to go down. He unbuckles the belt on his jeans, pulls his shirt over his head. Toki smiles, baring teeth, and approaches Skwisgaar, pocketing the knives but holding the scissors. A part of Skwisgaar sparks with fear—a man advancing them him with a sharp object is enough to make anybody spark in fear—but he tells his heart to calm down, lest he pass out from the experiencing immense panic and arousal at once.

Toki takes the scissors and draws a stripe across Skwisgaar’s bicep. It’s small, and it hurts like he would expect it to, but he’s distracted from that as soon as Toki licks the blood that’s pooling under the cut in the curve of his arm. Skwisgaar leans his head back, hitting the door, as Toki’s other hand starts to knead his cock through his jeans. He’s dizzy from an absolute cocktail of emotion, worsening as Toki moves his head up to bite Skwisgaar’s neck. It’s not deep enough to hurt him, but it’s not gentle enough to feel nice, caught in some uncomfortable in between that makes him grunt and shove Toki aside as his dick throbs, reminding him that he’s enjoying this.

“Whats?” Toki asks, all innocuous, and Skwisgaar responds by grabbing the scissors from his hand and licking his own blood from the blade.

They don’t get far the first time, too lost in each other and the new experience, Toki pouncing on Skwisgaar after he licks the scissors and throws them to the ground. The butter knives lay forgotten in the back pocket of Toki’s shorts on the floor while he rides Skwisgaar on the bed, sliding up and down Skwisgaar’s dick, twisting Skwisgaar’s nipples to the point of pain; Skwisgaar yelps and Toki swallows it with a kiss, Skwisgaar’s screams fueling him. If Toki had nails Skwisgaar know he’d rake them down his skin, but he doesn’t, and so Toki just digs, twists, pulls, and bites. Red scratches and blue bruises spot and stripe Skwisgaar’s skin like the fucking American flag, and he knows Toki won’t let him hit the ground, knows that Toki’s pledging allegiance with every teeth and tongue nick, knows that, as Toki grabs his own cock and jacks himself to climax, that this is his way of celebrating independence: semen on skin, blood, and blue, blue eyes, boring into each other, causing fireworks to go off here, there, everywhere. 


	56. H!pst3rz

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hipsterklok Skwisgaar/Toki.

“Ughs!”

“Skwisgaar, shuts up! I wants it!”

Skwisgaar and Toki are standing at the counter in a tattoo shop. Toki has just produced a picture of his cat and asked for a tattoo of its shape, in silhouette, on his leg.

“I’m payingks for it!” Skwisgaar says, snatching the picture from Toki’s hands. “And soes you will gets what I wants.”

“Uh,” the guy behind the counter says. He’s large, tattoos rippling across his arms and disappearing under his simple t-shirt. He looks bored. “You can’t, like, do that. The guy gets what he wants. Well. Within reason. There’s some technical—”

“Shuts up!” Skwisgaar hisses at the guy, whose eyes go wide; he takes a literal step back. Skwisgaar glares down at Toki, at his raggedy hair and plaid shirt buttoned to the top collar, eyeliner on the bottom of his eyes making them even more puppy-like. “Ams dis what you really wants, Toki?”

“Yes!” Toki says, and he jumps to the tip-toes of his Toms, which are so out-of-style but he refuses to listen to Skwisgaar and get some new, stylish shoes, like some classic Adidas. “Ever sinces I turneds eighteens—”

“That ams was two days ago—”

“Even befores that!”

“Ugh, fines.” Skwisgaar relinquishes the cat photo to Toki, who immediately flings his arms around Skwisgaar and cries thanks into his chest. It makes Skwisgaar a little aroused, so he pushes Toki back, spinning him in the direction of the guy behind the counter. “So, likes. Tattoos him nows?”

“Oh, I’m not the guy that does that. That’s our tattoo artist, Pickles.”  
And as if summoned by the sound of his name a dreadlocked redhead appears from around the corner. His sobriety is dubious, and Skwisgaar narrows his eyes at him. Pickles doesn’t even tattoos. “Dis ams de guys?”

“Yup,” Pickles says, coming out from behind the counter. “I have, like, thirty years in this business, so stop lookin’ at me like that, kid.” Skwisgaar sniffs, offended. “Who wants the tattoo?”

“Tokis!” Toki is jumping again. He’s worn holes in the toes of his Toms from this habit, and God, does Skwisgaar wish he would get new shoes.

Despite Skwisgaar’s (justified) concern, the Pickles guy does a great job. A black shadow of a cat wraps around Toki’s leg, just under the knee, and the skin looks healthy despite the heavy amount of tattooing required. Toki has a stupidly high pain tolerance, and he’s all giggles and smiles throughout the process. Skwisgaar feels his heart break over and over, watching Toki’s skin, which has never quite been virginal, get tattooed. 

In the car afterwards, Skwisgaar plays Toki’s favorite Animal Collective album, which he finds rather plebeian. But it makes Toki happy, and he’s singing along, Skwisgaar’s inka 2002 BMW taking the streets in stride. It’s a goddamn good day, one they’ll top off with by listening to bottom-of-the-barrel 50c vinyls and drinking fireball, Skwisgaar making sure that Toki applies lotion to his new tattoo regularly and lovingly.


	57. I Love You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More things you said meme fics. Skwisgaar/Toki.

**12. things you said when you thought i was asleep**

Falling asleep has always been easier with Skwisgaar in bed with him, but tonight Skwisgaar is not there. Toki tosses and turns, memories running marathons through his mind, curling his hand around the thin sheet under which he sleeps and wishing it was Skiswgaar’s paper skin. They don’t talk about the things they do at night in their cramped little room, not among themselves and definitely not to each other. But lst night was different, last night Skwisgaar kissed the nape of his neck and sunk his teeth into Toki’s skin while sinking into other, somehow less intimate parts of him. Breath warm and damp on Toki’s shoulder, Skwisgaar told him he loved him.

But that was last night, and this is tonight, and Toki is alone.  At some point he admits defeat and forces himself into sleep, bracing against the wave of nightmares about to crash over him with every muscle clenched. He’s in the middle of a dark forest with trees that are alive and leering at him when he wakes to the sound of somebody taking their boots off in the door frame.

Skwisgaar.

Toki keeps his eyes shut. 

Skwisgaar walks over and sits on the bed. On Toki’s side.

Toki keeps his eyes shut.

“Tokis.” There’s a hand, cool and callused, on Toki’s forehead.

Toki keeps his eyes shut.

“You’s been havingks de nightsmares, I sees. My faults. I—” A pause. Fingers on his forehead, feeling. “I got scareds.” Skwisgaar’s voice is a small animal Toki wants to protect. 

Toki keeps his eyes shut. And his body still.

Skwisgaar gets under the covers and envelops Toki in his body, giving Toki the coolness he needs to fall asleep for real. And Toki keeps his eyes shut and his body very still.

**18\. things you said when you were scared**

All around them the world is ending, loudly and violently and terribly. Their arms around each other, their hair tangling in each other’s, their bodies melting into one and not in the figurative sense, one of them says, “I loves you, I always has.” They don’t know who says it; it doesn’t matter; they are dead, as they have always been.


	58. The Multiverse Theory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Skwisgaar is selfish. Skwisgaar/Toki post-Doomstar.

The multiverse theory says that for every decision you make, a new universe is formed for each path you could’ve taken. Yes, you—yes, everybody—there are infinite universes filled with every possibility and you are only inhabiting one.

That means there is a universe in which Skwisgaar never started playing the guitar. In which Skwisgaar stayed in Sweden to be a lumberjack. In which Skwisgaar never met Toki.

Skwisgaar doesn’t remember much from his education, but he remembers the multiverse theory. He is too egotistical to neither deny nor accept it so it floats around in his mind with other concepts he has no opinions on, like politics and organized religion and marriage. There is a universe in which he never joined Dethklok. There is a universe in which he never met Toki. There is a universe in which he is happy.

The idea laid dormant in his mind until Toki claws back from Magnus’s clutches and starts talking again. It’s like every word he says pulls a tooth from Skwisgaar’s mouth, a small pain that seems manageable until there are so many of them it’s not manageable at all and there is blood running down Skwisgaar’s chin and he can’t speak. But somewhere else, Toki was never taken. Somewhere else, Skwisgaar has opinions on things like politics and organized religion and marriage.

“Dude,” he remembers Pickles saying, once, when they were young and Magnus was still in the band and it was dark and they were _somewhere_ , somewhere where it was dark and they could get high away from the rest, “You gotta live in the moment. Always. Because if you don’t live in the moment, you’re living somewhere else, and you can’t do that to yourself.”

Skwisgaar doesn’t remember what they were talking about; doesn’t remember anything but that they were high and it was dark and that he disregarded what Pickles said because, well, they were high and they were dark. He filed it in the back of his mind, next to the multiverse theory. Next to all the things Skwisgaar assumed he’d never need.

He squeezes Toki’s hand in the hospital bed. He wants to ask him how he’s feeling, but he doesn’t want to hear the response, doesn’t want to feel the pain. He is afraid his tongue will be the next to go and he will never be able to speak again.

Skwisgaar’s never been one for self-hatred, but he hates all the other Skwisgaars in all the other universes, the ones that are happy for whatever reason they are happy for. Blissful; ignorant; Skwisgaar, pre- _this_.

“Oh, fines.”


	59. Countdown

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Skwisgaar, Toki and the New Year.

_TO THE NEW YEAR,_

  
Skwisgaar said, smiling at Toki. He’d been so tender all night, so attentive, right on Toki throughout the party. Shielding him from prying eyes and prying hands and the general griminess of the general populace. Now it was nearing midnight and Skwisgaar was holding a glass of champagne, so dignified in his fitted suit and straight-combed hair, his eyes so fond. In them he held the precious, broken-and-repaired, priceless, thing he considered Toki.

_10._

  
The first shout blasted through Toki, shook his entire being. Skwisgaar remained still.

_9._

  
Toki raised his glass back. Sparkling Duck. He was a recovering alcoholic, forced into rehab, just a precocious month sober. Skwisgaar raised his champagne. The first drink all night, out of respect.

_8._

The glasses clinked.

_7._

They raised them tot heir lips.

_6._

They swallowed.

_5._

Toki wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Skwisgaar had spilled nothing.

_4._

They stepped closer to one another.

_3._

They cradled each other’s faces with their hands.

_2._

Toki’s heart beat faster and faster and faster. A panic attack, he recognized instantly, but something about it was so sweet. He was weak in the knees, his head was swimming, his palms were sweaty. All he could feel was Skwisgaar. Skwisgaar was still calm; he had made up his mind months ago, in that Revengencers hideout, his hands touching Toki for the first time in a long time.

_1._

Skwisgaar went for a gentle nip; Toki slammed his lips against him. They met in the middle.

_HAPPY NEW YEARS!_

The year before them had been rough. The year in front of them, not so much. In the middle of a very fancy, very formal party, surrounded by people who would be too drunk to remember, they felt alone in the room as they held themselves together and against one another. No movement, no nothing, a moment frozen in time. Streamers popped, fireworks went off, glasses chimed and they were, without a doubt, the most peaceful and content they’d ever been in their shared life.


	60. A Study of a Youth in White

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> angsty skwisgaar winter character study with shades of skwisgaar/toki.

It’s his last winter in Sweden, though he doesn’t know that yet. He’s nineteen, unemployed and homeless, and it’s cold, it’s so fucking cold, it’s the coldest winter on record. He stands on the side of the street shivering, his hands numb in fingerless gloves, shredding the guitar as fast as he can to generate body heat, nothing more, nothing less, and every time somebody drops something in his case he’s grateful. Even if it’s a wrapped hard candy; that is at least thirty calories, and when he puts it on his tongue the flavor bursts and tears springs to his eyes, though that could just be the wind.

The nights are the worst. He’s afraid he’s going to run out of warm places to crash for the night, legally or illegally, and die cold in the snow come the next. Somebody will have to identify him; they will call his mother, the first contact with her since he left home, and they will tell her that her son, her foolish, rebellious son, has died. He thinks about this every night as he props a crowbar open on a building or stays in a shelter. He thinks about this before he falls asleep. He thinks of his mother’s face. He thinks of her smudged lipstick and her messy hair and all the beauty lying underneath. He wonders if she’ll be in bed with a man when it happens.

But then he watches the sun break over the snow, watches it pour oranges and yellows down, watches as it catches the light and sends sparkles across the country. So bright it is blinding, though it offers no warmth, and he is overcome with love for this country, for this world. Fingerless gloves. A guitar on his back. A knit cap on his head, his hair still whipping around his face. Tears spring to his eyes. It’s the wind, it’s the cold, and it’s the harsh beauty of it all.

* * *

The next winter he is warm and in America. He is twenty. He could walk outside shirtless; he’s in Alabama, their idea of cold is his idea of summer. His bandmates laugh at him. He doesn’t care. When they are asleep in the morning he sneaks out and loiters on the porch of their shitty house in the ghetto, smoking a cigarette and watching the sun rise, shirtless. It will never compare to Sweden; he stamps out his cigarette and allows himself, for approximately fifteen seconds, to feel homesick.

* * *

In two years he is still in America, though he is even more south, a coastal town in Florida where seagulls swarm the parking lots and the houses are low and flat, painted in pastels. This is his first winter as a permanent member of Dethklok, though he doesn’t know that yet. They aren’t calling themselves Dethklok yet; they only have enough songs to fill half a demo and already a feud is cracking open. Skwisgaar tiptoes around the yolk of anger from that broken egg of a relationship, sneaking off by himself to smoke, to fuck, to snort coke and play the guitar for hours. He barely notices it’s winter; the season has lost all meaning to him. He barely thinks of Sweden; he barely thinks of anything.

* * *

Next winter and they’re Dethklok for real, their name decided, their set-up, their members, their manager all decided. They’ve moved from shitty apartment to shitty house and Skwisgaar has a fascination with the new kid.

“It’s not cold, eh?” he asks the kid, who is still new and polite and fresh, with wide blue eyes and holes in the knees of his jeans. They’re on the porch, Skwisgaar is smoking, the sun is rising, and Skwisgaar feels a sense of deja vu for something that hasn’t happened yet.

Toki shakes his head.

“Yeah,” Skwisgaar says. “Not cold at all.”

* * *

Years pass. Things change. Winter is still meaningless; the band is used to Skwisgaar and Toki forever in short sleeves, forever complaining about the heat. 

* * *

Then two things happen very close together: Toki’s dad dies, taking them to Norway, in the onslaught of their exhausting winter, and Skwisgaar has an identity crisis about his own father, taking him to Sweden in the closing of their exhausting winter.

He is ashamed to say he has forgotten the brutality of the winter in Scandinavia, even though this one is lukewarm, compared to the record-shattering cyclone of cold he’d experienced in his youth. He is as dedicated to being a regular jack-off as he was back then and that includes braving the cold, accepting the cold. He lets it waft into his bones. He lets himself look at the sunrise on the snow.

He is surprised when he feels homesick.

* * *

 

But the worst winter by far is not the ones he experiences in Sweden, too cold to think and on the constant brink of death. It is not the ones he spent lost in America with little English and dicks of band mates. It is the one he experiences after the old feud comes back to haunt them and Toki, his companion in eternal contentment, is taken.

That winter Skwisgaar cannot get warm. He blasts the heat far past a hundred in his room, far past what any man should be able to withstand, and still he shivers. He tries everything, from steaming baths to spicy foods, and still he shakes, still his flesh prickles. He sleeps past the sunsets, he smokes crystal meth to get rid of the homesickness, he wanders Mordhaus like a ghost in bed sheets and bare feet, a living personification of a draft in a castle.

For the rest of his long, eternal life, Skwisgaar will never experience a winter so cold.


End file.
